Chapter 4 | The Sorrow | The Invitation | Oriah Mountain Dreamer

25Feb10

Chapter 4 | The Sorrow from The Invitation

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon.  I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if  you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have come shriveled and closed from fear of further pain.  I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.

If we are strong enough to be weak enough, we are given a wound that never heals.  It is the gift that keeps the heart open…

Knowing how to do this (getting my heart broken over and over again), finding the courage to take another breath and not close my heart to myself or the world where there is pain, is what I seek to learn – how to love well…

We are a very creative species – we can use just about anything to anesthetize ourselves.  But in doing so, we also remove ourselves from feeling the joy.  Life becomes less, and if we are even slightly numb, it is hard for us to find the wisdom we need in our lives and in our world…

I cannot save myself, nor those I love, from the sorrow that is part of life.  Knowing this, it is tempting to protect myself from pain by simply closing a little to life, especially in the areas where I have been hurt, in the ares that matter most…

And the moment it (knowledge) is revealed, we become aware of a need from something else: for the wisdom to live with what we do not know, what we cannot control, what is painful — and still choose life…

“Do you choose to rise above your sorrow?”

When we learn to be with our pain, we retrieve the parts of ourselves we have attempted to leave behind, and we are able once again to love those parts of ourselves.  We find our wholeness and leave behind the impossible ideal of perfection that keeps us from the wisdom we need to live fully and compassionately with our humanness and the world…

 Chapter 4 | The Sorrow

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