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Holding Onto Pain



I hate sports analogies. I have no personal emotional connection with them and I often don’t understand what they mean. I chalk it up to never having been exposed to much of any sports during my youth, thanks to my dad - or whoever typically indoctrinates young boys in the language and symbols of sports.

But the other night when I experienced my first Reiki session, a sports analogy spontaneously arose in my mind. Evidently, part of the Reiki ritual (depending on who is practicing it) consists of the practitioner asking the person to be healed, “Are you willing to let go of your pain and be healed right now?” Or something very close to that.

I answered yes, but quickly realized I wasn’t totally sure if I was ready to do so. Because some part of me did not want to let go of the pains I had been carrying. They had become too valuable to me somehow. They had become a means of self-identification for better or for worse (mostly for worse). I had the sense of holding my pain very close to me, almost like it was a football or something. And that I was going to carry it as far as I could towards my end zone. Except, I realized (thanks to my handy first-ever useful sports analogy) that I wasn’t going to score any points by doing this, by carrying it all with me. And that other players would undoubtedly come along and try to get me to drop my precious cargo of pain somewhere along the way. And that instead of fighting and resisting, maybe I ought to just let go of it, let it fall into the grass.

Easier said than done though, when you have so much invested in negative patterns and views of yourself. To let go of pain in some sense seems to be letting go of a certain measure of predictability and security. Have you ever felt that? Coming out of long period of sadness or crushing depression, where you wake up one day and you realize you don’t feel so bad that day, and suddenly you find yourself longing for that bittersweet heroic feeling of sadness and suffering? It’s easy to convince yourself to pick up that mantle again. It’s hard to just let it go and move on.

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4 Reader Responses

  1. Allison Says:
    July 3rd, 2006 at 1:57 pm

    Coming out of long period of sadness or crushing depression, where you wake up one day and you realize you don’t feel so bad that day, and suddenly you find yourself longing for that bittersweet heroic feeling of sadness and suffering? It’s easy to convince yourself to pick up that mantle again. It’s hard to just let it go and move on.

    I know exactly how that feels. Sadness over losing a loved one I know is hard to let go of, because for one thing, that sadness is attached to your memories of that person and it feels like to let go of the sadness you have to stop remembering, which only makes you sadder. And the other thing is that eventually you do just start to move on, and you do stop feeling so sad, whether you like it or not, and that creates a certain guilt. So you almost try to keep feeling sad, to keep reminding yourself that you love them, because you hate them to feel they’ve been forgotten, and because who wouldn’t rather feel sadness than guilt.

    As the Nirvana song goes, “I feel a comfort in being sad”. There is a comfort in it. It’s a deep, almost rich, feeling. And it makes life feel more difficult, so you can feel better about just getting through the day, ‘being strong’ and holding yourself together, instead of really having to accomplish anything. It’s like what Mulder once said about going through life with a peg leg.

    But being sad all the time also sucks, and isn’t worth it. Succeeding and contributing real value to the world is what’s really difficult. Wallowing in sadness is a cop-out.

  2. alistair Says:
    July 3rd, 2006 at 3:23 pm

    wallowing is certainly a cop-out but we have to give ourselves time to heal from painful experiences. my view is that there is a neuro-chemical component to this and a spiritual component to this also. to heal is a process that follows fairly distinct periods that have to be visited and then moved away from in turn. if we stop at any of these points and make camp then we never grow away from the pain and suffer interminably.
    my only criticism of nirvana was that they romanticised the grief and thier fans bonded with it, to the point wher cobain made his death into an art piece, re-enforcing the state.

  3. JK Says:
    July 4th, 2006 at 1:31 am

    Man, I used to use this line all the time:

    Anytime I feel happy it makes me immediately wonder what is wrong.

    Not so much anymore, but it is still there.

  4. Nathan Says:
    July 5th, 2006 at 4:56 pm

    No one has made a connection to Star Trek 5 yet?



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