Pain as Call of the Earth

One of my own life’s guiding myths has been that “ Humans are meant to feel happy most of the time.” I’m sure this perception was encouraged by the culture I was raised in. Our country was founded on the idea of freedom and finding a better, happier life, and to this day we find this idea perpetuated all around us, especially in magazines and television. We chase this mythic happiness in many ways, and it often is very allusive. Especially when we see around us so much suffering, and often feel it in ourselves. When we suffer in pain, we can feel that we shouldn’t– that we should quickly figure out how to feel better, and get on with our “happy” lives. But when we deny our emotional pain, we deny our very selves. And we lose any real chance at truly knowing joy.

When trying to understand something better, I like to ask “ how does this serve me?” So, how does pain and emotional suffering serve us? What does it do for us? Pain ( grief, despair, anger, sadness, frustration) makes us aware that something in our life isn’t right. It’s like a radar for trouble, alerting us that we are heading the wrong way, and that new ways are needed. It is a tool for making us more aware of ourselves. Through sensation it shows us when some way we are doing things needs to die. Pain serves us like Pele does, leading us into death so that new life can emerge. Like Kali, like Shiva, pain destroys and creates anew. Our own body is metaphor: billions of cells dying each day to make room for new ones, each so full of life. Our larger body, Earth, does this, too– composts old giving birth to new life. And so it is with pain, when we allow it to serve it’s evolutionary purpose of making us aware that it is time to let go of old ways, so that new seeds can be planted in us to grow vigorously into fresh life. An egg and a seed are both broken, their old forms shed, to move into their new life- forms, into bird and flower. And so it us with us: we each need to look into our own painful breaking apart, so that collectively our species can blossom into a more beautiful and loving way of living in this biosphere.

When we look, we discover. We can find treasure hidden in places we were afraid to look. When we feel sadness or anger, or any emotional pain, we can first allow it, examine it, notice it like someone sitting in meditation notices breath. Breath into it. Head into it. It will often bring you to grief. “ Should you encounter grief. . .please recognize and embrace it as the very doorway you need” ( Bill Plotkin) Don’t hide from it. Head right into it, feel it, follow it. It will diffuse, release. It will, eventually, leave you fresh, refreshed, healed, with new discoveries and new energy. This is like going into your “dark night of the soul”, a time of hardship and deep looking which leaves you with new direction, purpose, self.



Around the time of the birth of my first child, I was filled with an immense sadness, a true grief for life on earth. I had never before felt this. In fact, I remember one of my best friend’s in high school so well–her gift of empathy for all the human tragedies she read about and how she was energized and made wiser through her compassion. But I didn’t have that. Not until George W. Bush was re-elected. And then it all came crashing open for me: the understanding that life was disappering from our planet home, and that we were causing it. I just felt all the possible sadness flow through me then, not for me, so much as for everything and everyone. For the birds, for the moss, for elephants and goldfish, for grass and  snails, for my friends and for my new baby. For all the new babies. For their future babies. . . Looking back I see that it was a gift; I couldn’t block it or hide from it because I was too open emotionally, being so pregnant and later being a brand new mother. Somehow this provided an opening through which came the grief, and with it a deeper connection to all life and a better understanding of who I am, and my reason for being alive. It has energized my path.

This “ pain for the world”, as Joanna Macy calls it, is like a collective awakening.This pain's “source lies less in concerns for the personal self than in apprehensions of collective suffering– of what happens to our own and other species, to the legacy of our ancestors, to unborn generations, and to the living body of Earth.” (Macy and Brown, Coming back to Life, pg 27) More and more people are feeling this consciously, are “ uncovering an immense and implacable sadness within themselves and recognizing that this is not a pathology but, to the contrary, a healthy and necessary response of our animal selves to the destruction of our world. . . [And, as Joanna feels,] this wave of awakenings might be Earth coming to it’s own defense in the form of maturing humans.” ( Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul, pg 229-230) Our grief is the earth speaking and acting through us. We must honor this call. With the energy unleashed by facing our pain, we can move mountains. Or save them...

I feel lucky to have stumbled upon Joanna Macy’s work. It shed light on my own experience, and helped me ( an continues to) work through my own pain for the world. ( Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown ( also one of my teachers who has guided me with this) have a beautiful and very apt book which delves deeply into this topic, called Coming Back to Life. Within it are many exercises to help catalyze you own pain for the world. )

Many people are numbed or afraid of opening to their pain. We humans tend to avoid feeling our pain. It is uncomfortable, unpleasant. Maybe we fear the upheaval of our lives, the acknowledgment, the change, the guilt that may arise. But what happens when we don’t heed the message of our pain? We need only look around now at our world. We see apathy, distraction, depression, addiction, stagnation, cultural and environmental destruction. Energy lost and stuck. Our bodies, too, suffer from stuffing our grief and anger, become diseased; our larger body of earth becomes ravaged. But “ that pain is the price of consciousness in a threatened and suffering world. It is not only natural, it is an absolutely necessary component of our collective healing. . . The problem lies, therefore, not with our pain for the world, but in our repression of it.” (Macy and Brown, pg. 27)

It helps to remember, when we are tempted to avoid feeling our pain that love is the other face of pain. Love and pain are two sides of one coin. They are bound one to another. There can be no loss, no grief, without love. It is for love that we feel pain. They are both part of our very nature. When we each look inside at this painful part of our humanness we will find our own self there. We do not suffer alone, we suffer with the world.When we open to it, acknowledge that it is part of who we are as beings walking this earth, and allow it to flow through us, we will find that we are also connected by it to one another: brother, sister, friend, tree, sea, fish and bird. If we can honor it as the Earth working through us to guide us into a better world, than it will not have been suffering in vain, but, rather, for the sake of the continuation of life and the evolution of our species.