Reflection #99 (23rd February 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)
I want to start my reflection (and I should say though this is listed as a mini-reflection in the OOS it turned out to be not-so-mini after all) with an echo of those words from the Franciscan teacher Richard Rohr: ‘All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain… If we don’t find a way to transform our pain, we will always transmit it to those around us or turn it against ourselves… If your religion is not teaching you how to recognize, hold, and transform suffering, it is junk religion.’
Pain is an unavoidable part of life – physical pain of course, but also emotional and spiritual pain – it’s the more emotional and spiritual aspects of pain that are our primary focus this morning. And pain comes in many guises – sadness, grief, anger, frustration – all sorts of big, difficult feelings.
One of my favourite contemporary spiritual teachers, the Buddhist psychotherapist Rick Hanson, has got this to say: ‘Painful experiences range from subtle discomfort to extreme anguish—and there is a place for them in life. Sorrow can open the heart, anger can highlight injustices, fear can alert you to real threats, and remorse can help you take the high road next time. But there is no shortage of suffering in this world. Look at the faces of others—including mine—or your own in the mirror, and see the marks of weariness, irritation, stress, disappointment, longing, and worry.’
He goes on to speak about the Buddhist teaching of ‘first and second darts’ which describes how our brain’s negativity bias can cause us to unnecessarily amplify our experience of pain. (This is ‘darts’ in the sense of seeing painful experiences as arrows that pierce us). He says: ‘Some physical and mental pain is inevitable. To use a metaphor from the Buddha, the unavoidable pains of life are its “first darts.” But then we add insult to injury with our reactions to these darts. For example, you could react to a headache with anxiety that it might mean a brain tumour; you could greet a romantic rejection with harsh self-criticism… Most absurdly, sometimes we react negatively to positive events. Perhaps someone complimented you, and you had feelings of unworthiness; or you’ve been offered an opportunity at work, and you obsess about whether you can handle it; or someone makes a bid for a deeper friendship, and you worry about being disappointing them. All these reactions are “second darts”—the ones we throw ourselves. They include overreacting to little things, holding grudges, justifying yourself, drowning in guilt after you’ve learned the lesson, dwelling on things long past, worrying about stuff you can’t control, and mentally rehashing conversations. Second darts vastly outnumber first darts. There you are, on the dartboard of life, bleeding mainly from self- inflicted wounds. There are enough darts in life without adding your own!’ Wise words from Rick Hanson.
The question at the heart of today’s service is ‘what do we do with our pain?’ And quite a few of the things that we humans typically do with our pain are… not especially helpful. At least not in the longer term. As we just heard, when we experience the unavoidable pains in life, the ‘first darts’, we do often build them up into something even worse with a rain of ‘second darts’. But there are a few other things that we tend to do with our pain that I want to mention. We might deny it, minimise it or squash it down – pretending that the bad stuff isn’t happening (or that it isn’t really bad! Rationalising it or otherwise doing mental contortions to avoid facing reality). I think there’s a certain amount of this going on in relation to global events at present – it’s all too big and too awful to take in – and many people (understandably) are kind-of looking away.
But pain that is denied, minimised, or squashed has a tendency to come out sideways, I think. We carry it inside us as an amorphous bad feeling which builds and roils and looks for an outlet. We might find ourselves dumping our rage and frustration on people who have got nothing to do with the real root causes of our pain, and lashing out at the unlucky ones who just happen to be in the line of fire when we snap, often our nearest and dearest, as they are usually the closest to hand. At a societal level this might look like scapegoating or witch-hunts. We can see this happening all around us now: so many people who are genuinely suffering poverty, insecurity, precarity and so forth, but who are wrongly projecting those legitimate grievances onto various scapegoats: refugees, or trans people, or ‘the wokerati’ or some other group that absolutely did not cause their suffering. Partly this horrific behaviour is a result of intentional and systematic misdirection by the super-rich, their media outlets, and their bot farms. But partly it’s because the people – and, even more, the systems that are causing all this pain – seem unreachable and impenetrable. We can feel impotent and helpless in the face of it all. It’s like Sunny Moraine said in the quote I shared earlier: ‘As things get worse, we are going to get progressively more angrily frustrated at our inability to reach and hurt the people who are making things worse, and that’s going to increase the urge to attack anyone we can reach, indiscriminately’.
So one of the less-than-ideal things we humans tend to do with our pain is pass it on to others. You may be familiar with the saying ‘hurt people hurt people’ – it’s a phrase which has issues, for sure – but there is a kernel of truth in it (not unlike Philip Larkin’s famous line ‘man hands on misery to man’). But sometimes our pain leads us to turn inward and engage in behaviours that are ultimately self-harming instead. Some of us self-medicate, numb ourselves, suppress the bad feelings with alcohol, drugs, food – or we compulsively engage in other distracting behaviours like endless scrolling or shopping or exercise or sex – activities that temporarily take our minds off the sources of our pain. Some of you might be familiar with the work of Gabor Maté in this field; his associate Stephanie Hollington-Sawyer said this: ‘addiction… originates in a human being’s desperate attempt to solve a problem: the problem of emotional pain, of overwhelming stress, of lost connection, of loss of control, of a deep discomfort with the self. In short, it is a forlorn attempt to solve the problem of human pain.’
Another response to pain is withdrawal – that’s one we might not immediately think of because, by its very nature, it tends to be invisible – when we are in pain there can be a temptation to retreat into our little individual caves and drop out of life. We might come to conceive of ‘other people’ as the primary source of pain and consequently hide ourselves away to protect ourselves from further hurt – letting go of relationships, dropping out of communities, disappearing from public life – or maybe just neglecting our connections with others, not actively maintaining them, being flaky, uncommitted, not putting our whole self in. We can fall into a state of passivity, even fatalism, that leads us to disengage.
So far I’ve mostly been diagnosing the problem, in a way; delineating all the not-so-great things we typically do with our pain. So what could we do instead? What might be more helpful or healthy? First off, I’d suggest, we need to acknowledge it, make space for it, so that we can truly feel our pain rather than pushing it away, denying it, or burying it. I think there’s some wisdom in that notion that ‘the only way out is through’ and that the process of healing and transforming our pain starts with accepting and allowing it. This is connected to a second thing we can do: we can express our pain. But let’s find places and spaces that are appropriate to allow and express our pain – or to use a more religious term, to lament – maybe we need regular and ongoing professional support from a therapist or spiritual director – maybe we have good friends who can make space for us to let it all out once in a while – or maybe we can share in carefully-held small groups like we do here at church. We all need places where we feel safe to be real. And if we can process our pain and suffering in such places maybe we’ll be less likely to find it ‘comes out sideways’, ricochets around, and hurts others. This work is not easy but we have a chance to consciously break the cycle of pain and refrain from passing it on.
It would be remiss of me not to mention that another thing we can do with our pain is to pray about it. If you’re at all familiar with the psalms, you’ll know that there’s a long tradition of crying out to God – and not making it pretty or polite either – just pouring out your unfiltered anguish to the One Who Listens. Or you might have a regular set prayer that helps you to get things in perspective – just this week I have reminded a few people about the Serenity Prayer – ‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.’ One reason why this prayer means so much to so many people is that it points to a middle way – it cajoles us out of despair – and focuses on what we can do to transform our painful situation. When our pain is arising from injustice it’s crucial to do what we can to take action and make change.
And one more thing that we can do with our pain is let it change us for the good. Perhaps it will leave us more compassionate for the sufferings of others; more empathetic and tender-hearted. This doesn’t happen by default. Pain can leave us contorted and bitter. But we do have some choice in the matter, I reckon, and our tough experiences can sometimes – somehow – be alchemically transformed – and transformative – breaking us open to connect with all the other suffering souls.
As we draw to a close I want to return to the wise words of Rick Hanson who offers this thought for us to take into the week ahead: ‘This week, take a stand for yourself, for feeling as good as you reasonably can. A stand for bearing painful experiences when they walk through the door—and a stand for encouraging them to keep on walking, all the way out of your mind. This is not being at war with discomfort or distress, which would just add negativity. Instead, it is being kind to yourself, wise and realistic about the toxic effects of painful experiences. In effect, you’re simply saying to yourself something you’d say to a dear friend in pain: I want you to feel better, and I’m going to help you. Try saying that to yourself in your mind… Focus on where you can make a difference, where you do have power; it may only be inside your own mind, but that’s better than nothing at all.’
And I’ll leave you with just a few final words by the great American writer, theologian, and civil rights leader Howard Thurman, words to take to heart in this moment, I reckon:
‘This is important to remember: given the fact of pain as a normal part of the experience of life, one may make the pain contribute to the soul, to the life meaning. One may be embittered, ground down by it, but one need not be. The pain of life may teach us to understand life and, in our understanding of life, to love life. To love life truly is to be whole in all one’s parts; and to be whole in all one’s parts is to be free and unafraid.’ May it be so for the greater good of all. Amen.
Reflection by Jane Blackall