To You, Dear Pain

This past spring, I had the gift and honor of assisting mind-body coach. Rebecca Tolin, in her course, Be Your Own Medicine, a 10-week course devoted to helping people with chronic symptoms find healing and freedom. 

After one of our two hour classes, this poem came through me. It speaks to the heart of my healing journey where I am learning how to relate towards what aches with an open, loving presence.

When I work with clients, we are in a similar process of welcoming and opening a seat at the table for the different parts within that are yearning to be seen. We do this through embodied exploration and intimacy with the passing waves of sensations, symptoms, and emotions alive in the body. Rather than fighting or even trying to transform the pain, we first sit and be with it with a curious, loving attention. This work takes a courageous heart where we turn towards that which we so often resist.

So I share this poem in hopes that it may speak to your own wise heart and serve as a reminder to open a seat at the table for that which is calling for your love.

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

~Rainer Maria Rilke