Jasmin Lee Cori, M.S. - Author, Mind, Body & Spirit

When the world is crumbling around us, we sometimes feel irked when we see people who are blissfully happy. How can they be immune to the problems and pain in our world, we wonder. How dare they be happy?

While it’s true that a great many dim their awareness of suffering, that’s not true for everyone. Think of His Holiness, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. He is certainly aware of suffering but shows us that we don’t need to get lost in the suffering. We can be aware of suffering and also aware of the incredible beauty and love that is here. We don’t need to allow the agony to take away the ecstasy, the pure joy built into the fabric of the universe.

It’s sort of radical to think that we minister to suffering by learning to let it go. I’m from the psychology field, and I understand that we need to feel our hurts for them to dissipate, yet I am also aware that we can easily become mesmerized by our pain and get stuck there. This is not something we do on purpose—sometimes part of us is frozen there. When we get lost in our suffering, we lose sight of the unmarred part of our nature, the part that is whole and is beyond suffering. And also the good that is still present. Then we don’t need to turn away from suffering. Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman killed in the Holocaust, wrote this in her diary:

I am with the hungry, with the ill-treated and the dying, every day, but I am also with the jasmine and with that piece of sky beyond my window....It is a question of living life from minute to minute and taking suffering into the bargain.... Suffering has always been with us, does it matter in what form it comes? All that matters is how we bear it and how we fit it into our lives.

Etty was big enough to be with an unimaginable amount of pain without drowning in it. Part of being "big enough" is to keep working on ourselves so that our own pain is not in the way. I've noticed that people with a lot of unprocessed pain often do one of two things: they flee from any pain in their environment or they entrain with it. Much like catching a flu virus, they catch pain on contact. That's one more person in pain and one less to help, it seems. Catching the pain just spreads it further.

I think we need to learn to hold the pain rather than be the pain. As a bowl holds water without becoming water, we need to hold pain without being dragged down by it. That means we have to be larger than the pain and keep at least one foot outside of it.

Then we can also be with the jasmine and the piece of sky. We can stay connected to the beauty and the dignity of life and not get trampled down by unconsciousness and evil. We can honor the happiness as well as the heartbreak, knowing that both are here to serve.



Based on a piece by this name in The Magic of Your True Nature [link to book]