agatha speaks - stay with the pain

Stay with the pain

I don’t even want to write this. I can’t stand it. I can’t fix the world. I can’t fix anyone else. I can’t fix those I love and care about. I can’t tell anyone what to do, can’t even tell then what is wrong with them and how they could fix it. All I can do is stay with the pain, anger and frustration, work with that awakening of Great Beings—Keep Silence—and learn from it, learn from these examples, understand that these others are serving as mirrors for me, here in my sangha, that there is something inside me that needs to be changed, that only I can change and that is the only thing I can change.

I can’t fix the world nor can I change it, except in my own small way of changing myself. And this writing is one huge lesson, reviewing the thoughts in my head from the last hour, my indignation, my getting on my high and mighty horse of superiority in preparation for riding up to the one I care about to tell him the so obvious truth of what is wrong with him, battling all the while the tension, fear and anxiety that this preparation is causing in me, thinking I hate to do this but it’s so obvious, I must tell him! only to come back here and see this note that I left myself to write this morning on Keep Silence.

A message to my self from my Self, a lesson for the one who would proselytize: Keep Silence.

And, in addition, stay with the pain. You can’t fix the world. You can’t tell anyone anything. The only one you can change is yourself.

And yes, it’s hard. That’s why they call it pain. Suffering means to endure. That implies a length of time. That implies carrying this pain for a while, this implies doing this work yourself, not going to someone else for a remedy.

Ah. So. Corollary: No one else can fix you either. We’re all in this together. We are sangha to one another, we mirror all the myriad faces of humanity to one another, so we can all learn. But each of us is different, each a unique set of archetypes, no two alike, and each must find his or her way to the travel the path of life, must stay with the pain given to him or her, must suffer this life, endure it and learn, and pass through all the trials, alone and together, staying not only with the pain but with the joy, with the failure and the victory, the comforting and the celebrating.