Overcoming Pain through Compassion not through avoidance

Overcoming Pain through Compassion not through avoidance.

Pain is something which is an unwanted feeling, but somehow we are more or less addicted to it. If everything is fine, hunky-dory we get bored and want to have something else and look for more challenging tasks or something more stimulating. Now this is all good where we wanted to have it and somehow or the other we make arrangements to prepare for it.

What if pain comes up from a clear blue sky, highly unanticipated situations? How to face it? What if there are situations or events that you expect will go smoothly and it turns out exactly opposite? It hurts right? It hurts very badly. We enter into that realm of melancholy and don't know how long it keeps haunting us and pushes us into some sort of depression if not too deep into it. These are those situations that we would love to avoid, but inevitability keeps striking back. Life throws at us experiences that we never anticipated and it becomes really a struggle to face them or accept them.

How to deal with pain without avoiding it is the crux of this article.

Radical Acceptance

In psychology "radical acceptance" is the term which is used for these kind of situations. Instead of fighting with the reality of an untoward incident, you accept the situation the way it is. The way life has thrown on your face straight without any warning. Accept it and face it. Instead of ruminating on "why me?," "why to me only?," "why to my life only?," one can say, okay it has happened, what next, what should be my next move? Where should I go next? If the situation is not giving you anytime to think, then go with whatever flow you can just flow. If it is giving you sometime to think, then analyze it and choose the most appropriate way to maneuver through it and come out successfully.

Well it is not so easy. I know.

Sometimes the pain is so hurting, that it might as well take years to let go and heal ourselves. Under such circumstances the one beauty of radical acceptance is to melt into it. Because in denial of pain we are struggling more to come out of the entanglement and enhance the tangling's rather than reduce them.

While the pain is inevitable because of whatever the circumstances which could be not under our control, the suffering is based on choice completely. Suffering is where one can make a choice, either to suffer or not to suffer.

The process

Sit or lie down in a safe place and undergo through the painful situation and while you are carrying out this process don't try to deny anything, even if the mistake is from your side, accept it, don't deny it. Just accept it and melt into it. Then, one fine moment of it through this process when complete denial stops and you have melted completely into it and accepted it (if you have to cry, then do that also) then a gentle relief comes up. From that gentle relief and in that moment have compassion towards you. Build that compassion for yourself. Love yourself the way you are. Accept yourself the way you are - your strengths and weaknesses, your skills, your capabilities and inabilities, your ups and downs, your praises and blames, everything. Keep accepting everything compassionately. Say unto yourselves, it is all fine. It is okay to be imperfect also and there is a perfection in imperfection. Keep remembering that. Love yourself so much that you can forgive everything about you and others also. Cultivate, develop, improve that compassion so that it becomes very easy for you to accept and go through that pain smoothly and when you are completely free, all the entanglements loosen up and you can come out of them easily. 

• Remember in the denial the strangling's get more complicated, in acceptance they can get loosened up.
• In practice of acceptance we let go the resistance
• In letting go the resistance we allow the compassion to get in
• With compassion we should and able to love ourselves first, and then we can spread that compassion to others

Acceptance does not mean agreeing

Now acceptance does not mean agreeing. If something bad has happened, that does not mean you agree for it to happen again and again. You are not becoming someone's door mat. You accept for the current situation or the situation that has occurred in past and take all those measures so that you correct your course and shift the direction of the sails and proceed towards higher realms of compassionate living, harmonious success, peace, tranquility and poise.