Our Hurt

With palms together,

Good Morning All,

So many of you have written to ask how we can forgive and move on! It makes me think that perhaps we are taking ourselves way too seriously. People are people, we each seem to live in our own world made of our own thought and feelings, yet we somehow expect others to not only understand us, but perceive within our worldview. This is like asking two hurt puppies to nurture each other.

Will addressing the person who has hurt us make it better? Sometimes. It is doubtful. Only if we possess extraordinary listening skills would this be advised, in my opinion. Getting something "off our chest" is too often for our benefit, yet we go around rationalizing that it is for the benefit of the other. In fact, it actually amounts to 'dumping' our load on someone else's shoulders.

If someone has hurt us, perhaps we should look deeply into the hurt. Often hurtness is more about our expectation of another's behavior than anything else. We expect a sister in law to behave a certain way, or a boyfriend or a girlfriend to love us in a way we believe they should, but then they behave in a way we either don't understand or cannot accept. We see this as an affront to ourselves, sometimes to our values, but most often to our expectations for their behavior.

Ooops, there goes that self-righteous ball a-rolling!

What to do? The hardest work of all: nothing. Sit still and let the universe take care of itself. Hurt only remains with us if we keep picking at it. A daily practice of zazen along with on-going mindfulness practice can be of great benefit with this.

This is very hard work. It requires something of us: that we sit on our hands (to use on old chess training method) and not snap off moves so quickly. Easy? Hardly. I have been at this a very long time and I still knee-jerk with my mouth on far too many occasions. Still, I am aware immediately as I am doing this. And in that awareness is often the desire to be still and not react. Our practice makes it possible to be present without being so swept away by the floods of feelings and thoughts. And on those increasingly rare times when we are swept away by our anger or hurt, we are able to pull ourselves out more quickly, on the one hand, and experience the suffering we have caused, on the other. These then, become opportunities for personal and social growth.

Now, to take my own advice.

Be well.