It Hurts || By Beth Hinnen, Certified Mindfulness and Meditation Teacher
Movies always deliver. My choices have changed over the years, however one element is always critical for me — transformation. When a character has insight, introspection, an epiphany, internally or externally triggered, I don’t care. What I want to see is that a different choice can be made, a different path taken, a new lease on life had. I have to know it’s possible, even if it’s fiction. After all, movies are written by humans (so far). And it has to be within the human experience for it to make it into a script, otherwise, we wouldn’t know about it, would we?
In any case, I watched “Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 3” the other night, and cried almost the whole way through. First, watching defenseless creatures being experimented on is torture. My empathetic characteristics go into overdrive. Yes, I feel their pain. Having been on the receiving end of other people’s agenda with no agency to draw boundaries, I completely know that feeling of helplessness. Second, when the surgically altered raccoon is tossed into a cage with other similarly altered animals, they gather around, instantly relating to his pain and offering immediate solace. And rather than them trying to talk him out of what he’s feeling, or using distracting comments or actions to ignore the grotesqueness of his recent ordeal and thereby, also effectively denying their own pain (it takes an exchange or two to back off), they give him time to acclimate, to adjust to his new condition, accepting his silence until finally, he says one word.
“Hurts.”
And one of his new compatriots gets a rag from her cell mate, wets it with her tongue, and gently wipes at the trickle of blood coming from beneath the metal plate recently implanted on his head.
And this is what got me. I cried recognizing what courage it takes to say, “it hurts” with no explanation, no justification, no excuses or blame. Even more so, I cried harder to see the vulnerability received with compassion, acknowledgement, no judgment and no cajoling to feel better. I honestly can not remember a time when I was completely, kindly and lovingly witnessed for a painful moment, upon hearing devastating news, or making a colossal mistake that I regretted with zero interjection by someone else about their experience. Okay, once, from my father when fear overwhelmed me and he just held me, even as he was being urged to stop because we had to be somewhere else.
What would it feel like to collapse and stop being brave, smart, put together, a complete know-it-all and allow whatever feelings are there to be a-okay, just fine, and even sensible? To discover that, in such a collapse, we are not destined to drop down a dark well and be lost. Rather, we find that, either with ourselves or if we’re lucky, with someone else, there is a safe refuge of being completely human, with all our emotions in tact and that in experiencing them, fear drops away and a sense of competency and wholeness wells up. When we are with whatever arises without pushing it away (or letting someone else talk us out of it), we find a tenderness of heart, a strength of spirit, and the ability to extend compassion to others in a similar space.
Now, before we go off the deep end, this is not the same as wallowing in self-pity, crying victimhood, or railing against the unfairness of life. In Yoga Sutra vernacular, these last three examples are vrittis, mind whirlwinds, stories that define who we think we are. Vrittis are more often than not painful thought clouds that obscure us from the truth of our experience, that keep us locked into the persistent, pervasive feeling of precariousness, as my teacher, Reverend Jaganath defines dukkha, or suffering. More often than not, vrittis are not based on lived experience. Quite the contrary, they are figments of our imagination, perhaps fueled by a bit of reality, though typically blown up into a much more tragic event than the original incident.
Take the story of being cut off in traffic. We may exclaim in the moment, “Ugh!” Or something more exciting and colorful. And if we sat with the rush of adrenaline, recognized our well-being and even our competency of not running into said car, we could just shake it off (like animals are known to do) and resume our drive. However, for many of us, we begin to imagine, “what if?” What if we’d not seen the car? What if we’d not had brakes? What if we’d crashed into the car and other cars piled into us from behind? By the time we get home to our partner, or talked to a friend, we might fearfully exclaim, “I almost died today!” Sound familiar?
Back to the movie. Rather than space and silence and a willingness to let the raccoon come to terms with his plight, the other animals might have exclaimed their vrittis, saying, “Oh my god, he really did a number on you! He’s so evil. I wish he would die. Did he put you under or were you awake? When are we getting out of here? Did he smell like bad cheese like he always does?” Notice how all these vrittis are about an external experience and have little to do with the more important experience, the internal one.
Science has shown that most emotions last 30-90 seconds. That’s it. What lasts longer than that is the story, the vrittis, about the emotion or event. We can tell the getting-cut-off-in-traffic story for days, weeks, months, bringing up a similar sensation in our body. However, if we truly sat with the initial emotion, rode it out to its full and complete expression, witnessing it and treating it with kindness and respect, perhaps we would not need to keep reliving it. Perhaps what we are missing in our lives these days isn’t the technical understanding of emotions or how the brain works. It’s the simple practice of feeling the pain and saying, “It hurts.”
As I drove to the mountains the next day for a hike, those words kept coming back to me. And I was soon flooded with innumerable times from childhood, adolescent, young adulthood, hell, a few weeks ago, of instances where there was hurt that did not get acknowledged — times where I had wished someone would have been able to simply hold my hand, not to make the hurt go away, not to be told it was going to be all right, not to hear of someone else’s pain to make mine look less; instead, as a witness, as an acknowledger of my felt experience who would mirror my capacity to be with it.
What I see as the challenge to humanity, what is keeping it from choosing a course other than polarization, division, harming the earth and its inhabitants isn’t AI, climate change, the possibility of a second Trump term; it’s the inability to fully feel our feelings, to recognize them and see them as legitimate. When we deny the human experience of emotions, especially in ourselves, how can we possibly have compassion for other people in pain? All the world’s atrocities stand on dehumanization which is essentially stripping people of their emotional capacity.
As Khalil Gibran writes,
“Many of us spend our whole lives running from feeling with the mistaken belief that you can not
bear the pain. But you have already borne the pain. What you have not done is feel all you are beyond that pain.”
When we feel pain and can be a witness to that, and to the pain of others, only then can we feel what we are beyond the pain. We experience our compassion, kindness, curiosity and courage to be with our ourselves, our fellow humans and earth’s creatures without divides, without polarizations (yep, we are often internally polarized too) without fear. That gesture, that small allowing of riding out what emotions and sensations arise, will lead us to a choice that can heal our dystopia for our own good, and the good of those around us.
The next time something hurts — someone says something, someone does something, you do or say something — take a moment to be with it, maybe even saying (perhaps silently) “it hurts, this hurts” and feel it fully.
Bear the pain, and then begin to feel all that you are beyond it.
About the Author: Beth Hinnen came to the spiritual path from the corporate world. After experiencing impermanence and greed, she left to study Yoga and has over 1,000 hours in Yoga teacher training, and ended up specializing in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, spiritual scripture that closely aligns with Buddhism. From there, she studied Zen Buddhism for over ten years, including in-person, month-long monastic retreats, until she earned certification, in January, 2023, as a Mindfulness and Meditation Teacher with Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach. Currently, Beth is a co-leader of the IMCD Council, and on the Teachers Collective, as administrator. She hosts a Meetup group called Yoga Meets Buddhism, and for the past three years, has held an online Dharma Wednesdays class that discusses the Yoga Sutras while also bringing in Buddhist teachings, along with Sufi poets, Christianity, Judaism and other spiritual paths that reinforce the words of Sri Swami Satchidananda, the founder of Integral Yoga where Beth studied. “The truth is one, the paths are many.” More information about Beth is at www.samayaco.org.
