A Painful Lesson

I used to suffer too, until I got tired of it.

When I stopped telling my life as a story about suffering, I began to notice that life was actually charged with bliss, punctuated by occasional episodes of pain.

Then I noticed something even more remarkable. When I allowed myself to go deeply into the pain, to experience the pain 100% without narrating it, without superimposing a story of suffering upon it, the pain turned into pure energy: the same energy that bliss was made of! What made the pain feel like suffering was resisting it, and labeling it with the story of Poor Me.

The past is the story of Poor Me. The future is the story of Great Me. But Now is not a story. Now is the space of pure life, pure love. Whenever I want to enter the Kingdom of Now, I just give up the story.

But this can be a painful lesson.