The Universality of Pain...

"Until you realize your pain is human, and not unique, you will separate yourself from everyone else on the planet." God through my mind, yesterday.

Let that sink in...

I mean, I had this thought yesterday while doing my day.  It was like a hungry dog, following me through the streets of some barren cityscape.  It just wouldn’t leave me.  No matter what I did, it just was there, a constant and unremitting phrase in my mind.  

This happens to me sometimes...something just gets deep into my psyche and I cannot shake it.  Not that I try all that hard.  I have learned that it is best just to let my mind do what it is going to do...resistance is futile!

So I am walking around in my life yesterday, cleaning cat litter boxes, feeding the cats, vacuuming up the cat litter, etc, and this thought, “until you realize your pain is human, and not unique, you will separate yourself from everyone else on the planet...” kept running through my mind.

I am blown away by the fact that I never thought this before!  I mean it feels so true, so fucking absolutely true!  We all suffer the same.  ALL OF US!  There is not pain that is unique!  Each of us have our own path with grief and loss and heartbreak and sadness but the essence of the emotional experience is universal.  If we haven’t walked the path, perhaps we cannot know the emotional experience, but if we have, then the experience is universal.  It is the same for all of us.  We shall always put our own personal spin on the experience, but when we boil it all down, we all suffer the same...

And the thing that makes our suffering so much greater, and alienating, is this persistent belief that what we feel is unique to us.  That we feel this kind of pain, but no one else does.  No one else knows, no one understands...but we do.  We all do.  To suffer is to be a member of the human race...

I never realized until yesterday that my insistence that the pain in this life that I feel is unique, makes what I am feeling acutely more painful.  And alienating.  Terribly alienating.  I may not know exactly how one feels who has had an experience of loss, but I sure the fuck know how it feels to grieve, to lose, to be despairing.  And there is a universality to my pain that I didn’t allow for until yesterday, oddly while I was cleaning up after my herd of cats.  God’s grace comes to me at the most interesting and banal times!  

What occurred after this realization was that I felt different, less separated.  I felt more in the stream of my life, through this connection and belief that pain and loss and grief are what binds us together.  Or, as I have always done, can be the thing that we put between us and everyone else.  You couldn’t possibly know how I feel, what I have lost, what I am grieving.  Perhaps that is true, but to say that no one else on the planet has ever felt the way I do, is perhaps one of the most arrogant beliefs I have ever held.  And I am embarrassed to say that I held this fucker until yesterday. When I had yet another spiritual awakening, while cleaning the fucking litter boxes.  And that is just exactly how my God works, I am ripe for further opening at any time, for any reason...I just have to be willing.

So I stopped what I was doing yesterday and came in and wrote down the quote that was running incessantly through my mind.  I know, from painful experience, that I will not remember unless I commit it to screen immediately.  I think I can remember it because it is so profound and life altering, but, no, later as I try to bring it back into focus, it is lost to me, sometimes forever. 

So when I have moments like yesterday, I stop the incessant motion of Erin track and go take a moment to write it down so that I can come back to it later.  And here we are today.

Perhaps this will not land in you like it did in me.  That is fine.  I just know that yesterday before I had this thought I was more separate from all of you.  And after the thought, I was not.  We all suffer the same and my insistence that my pain, loss, grief and sadness is unique will forever keep me distanced and away from that which I crave most in this world:  connection, intimacy and authenticity.

My pain is not unique.  It is universal.  And that, I am seeing, is such an amazing epiphany...one that has altered the course of my life...

Again, still...