“Pain is a powerful call to enter anew places that I thought I knew.”
That’s from a book by Dianne M. Connelly titled All Sickness is Homesickness. It’s a small book that’s taking me some time to read but I’m finding many similarities to ideas and thoughts I included in my own book. Validation feels good and I like that feeling.
Her comments on pain reminded me that so many of us simply try to avoid pain without looking at the messages it might contain. Pain is no fun but it certainly is important.
She goes on: “It may be that our pains are our biggest way home, our most urgent call to Being. Perhaps nothing else other than what we call pain would capture our attention so insistently and thoroughly. It may be that we have to be awakened to our nobility by some sort of wake-up call, and often that call is a sensation of pain in our body and psyche. The great stories of quests and journeys and pilgrimages throughout history underscore the way home as the capacity to transform a pain, a terrible circumstance, a frightful obstacle into an instrument for journeying home in the all-embracing journey of life. We forget. We need reminders, like a monastery bell that will stop us in midsentence and call us to life past our ordinary wakefulness and our already knowing-it-all. We need to listen. Pain summons us until we attend to the old familiar with a new wonder. Our lostness demands we find our way home.”
Well, that’s it in a nutshell, friends. It’s pretty much the framework of my own book only she says it much more succinctly than I do. I wish I could write like that. I’ll just keep practicing.
One thing I don’t want to do, and she doesn’t either, I’m sure, is make pain into some sort of practice, something to force us into becoming “holy,” or whatever. There have been people throughout the ages who thought that beating and torturing the body, whether someone else’s or one’s own, into “submission” would lead to holiness. Nothing is further from the truth.
The body is the outward expression of one’s soul, one’s True Self, and thus is worthy of respect and care. Treating the body as if it’s a detriment to true spirituality or something animalistic that needs to be tamed is so very wrong.
When the body feels pain, there is a message, a message that something is amiss between the road we’re on and the road we’re meant to be on in order to fulfill the intent of our souls. It might be a wrong thinking, it might be a behavior or a belief, but something is paining our soul when the body pains.
Now all that I’ve written so far is easy enough to understand intellectually. It’s not so easy to figure out the details, to decode the message, to find out what’s paining the soul. If it were easy, I would have done it already. I don’t think I’d still be fretting and stewing over the pains and difficulties of fibromyalgia.
But I can say that, while in many ways I express the pain, stiffness, and awkwardness of fibro, among its myriad other symptoms, in other ways I’m so much better, have less pain. At least I can sit and type this message with only minimal pain – until I try to get up. LOL
But even that was at one time impossible. So I’ve made some progress and that pleases me. I must be getting closer to my soul, to home. It also encourages me to keep doing the work it takes to figure out what areas where I’m still out of sync with my soul and then hoping I have the courage to do what it takes to transform the pain, to overcome the obstacle that my soul is telling about.
If you’re having some sort of pain, whether a headache or a toothache, or some more chronic pain, I hope you’ll find the wisdom in Connelly’s words and some hope, perhaps, in my experience, and listen to your soul. Homesickness is separation from our home, our soul. Be fearless and make the journey and come home.
Sam,
This is a great reminder of how sometimes our greatest blessings can come from our greatest obstacles (pain). I think if we accept that there is a lesson in every painful experience-physical, emotional,mental, spiritual- we can leave ourselves open to new growth. Pain does serve a purpose.Like you say,” make the journey and come home.” Thanks for sharing as you do-always conveying thought-provoking and meaningful messages:-) Blessings, Kathy
LikeLike
Hi Kathy. I know none of us wants to feel pain, either physical or mental/emotional, but I think it’s important to realize that nothing happens by accident, or so “they” say. Still, I do think sometimes things “just happen” but it’s still important to find a message in the way we respond to those happenings. IOW, there’s always something we can learn from everything. Even if it’s just having an “experinece” it can be significant. Thanks for reading.
LikeLike