My Wholistic Life Poems
Who wants to feel pain?
Why we avoid pain so badly? The simple answer is that it hurts. Who enjoys feeling pain? I don’t know many people who do.
But reality is that pain seems inevitable like when you cut your finger or when you break a leg. After cutting your finger whether you like it or not we will feel pain. Sometimes pain takes you by surprise like when you have a broken heart or when a loved one passes away. Not in a million years would people be happy to have their hearts broken or wish for their parents to die. This is what I call emotional pain. It hurts so much more than cutting a finger, which by the way seems to heal much faster too.
I remember as it was yesterday, when my mom passed away and I did not get to go to her funeral. I had to stay outside of the cemetery because my family thought I should not experience that moment. They would say to me that they wanted me to remember my mother how she was before, beautiful, smiley and happy and not a corpse in a coffin.
Well, they just wanted me to not feel that pain. Perhaps not to face that reality of life. Death is part of life, we are all going to die eventually, even though we don’t know when. What they did not realise is that they were preventing me from feeling that moment, processing and signifying it. That pain was meant to be felt. If we wish to live life fully we need to do it viscerally, with every single cell in our bodies. What is the pint of living if you cannot feel a thing?
What that experience taught me was that I should never feel pain ever again because it hurts and who wants to feel pain, who needs to feel all of these overwhelming feelings? I am not sure how I did it but I started to suppress my feelings and I got really good at it. I created a very ingenious coping mechanism. I would press a button, and humanity would be turned off.
The main issue with suppressing your feelings is that you go through life numb but the feelings don’t really go away. They are there, imprinted in your soul. And eventually these overwhelming feelings and emotions might present themselves in our lives as terrible health conditions because if the soul cannot contain them much longer it purges through our bodies.
One of the most miraculous things in life is when a mother gives birth. I have never had a child but from other women’s experiences, they endure an unbelievable amount of pain to be able to give birth. And then we wonder, is it worth it all that pain? Most mothers would say yes. They don’t regret one bit. It is a necessary pain one might think. So why would they put themselves through it knowing how painful it is? Are they masochists?
I would like to believe that pain liberate us, it cracks us open like when the child is born and you feel the relief and the joy of what is next because you know that after that agonising moment something miraculous is coming from it. It makes us more resilient and humble. It makes us fall on our knees and feel grateful for overcoming it. It changes our perspectives and how we relate to the world. It is impossible to be the same after experiencing that discomfort. It shakes our worlds. We start understanding how small we are in such an infinite dimension that we live in.
I do not believe that I would be the woman that I am today it wasn’t for the amount of pain I had to endure since early age. It moulded my character, it expanded my mind. It made me sensitive and sensible enough to be adaptable in a world where people crack with the wind and the inevitable changes.
It took me a long time to understand that by avoiding pain I was also avoiding all the joy that it could bring me. I didn’t want to feel uncomfortable. But being comfortable doesn’t allow us to grow and expand. For us to be able to grow we have to crack that shell that keep us comfortable and protected. It leaves us vulnerable but only the courageous hearts can be vulnerable, only the ones who know how to love can flourish and expand. Because it is with love that we can ease the pain and not with fear.