Embracing Pain

Photo by Joshua Brown on Unsplash

Inspiration

“"If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it."

--  Zora Neale Hurston

Reflection

What hurts right now? 

Practice

Check out this 3 minute video with Sacred Activist Joanna Macy about embracing pain: If you want, take a moment to share one thing that’s painful right now. As Joanna Macy says, “Because we speak it, we don’t stay there [in despair]... We crack it open by speaking it.”

Go Deeper

Black Queer writer, activist, and teacher Rev. angel Kyodo williams discusses “Making Friends with Discomfort” in this 30 minute video. With an active and engaging practice and conversation, Rev. angel teaches how to meet discomfort “so that your field can include the pain but you don’t become the pain.” She gives tools for integrating pain by teaching how to “be with it from a resourced place that allows you to include it as part of what is unfolding in reality.” She says, “We’re making the choice not to like it or love [pain], but to meet it exactly where it is.”