Become a Lake

"The more spacious and larger our fundamental nature, the more bearable the pain in living." - Wayne Muller

Last week I found the below teaching in Mark Nepo’s The Book of Awakening. I then visited a beautiful meditation studio in downtown Portland called Pause, where the teacher coincidentally spoke towards this same idea…

A Hindu master grew old of his young apprentice complaining and sent him out to retrieve salt. Upon his return, the master asked the young man to take a handful of salt and put it in a glass of water. "Take a sip. How does it taste?" The apprentice spit it out, "awful". 

Now the Master asked the apprentice to bring the salt with them as they journeyed to a lake. He told the young man to put the same handful of salt in the lake and take a sip. "How does it taste"?. The apprentice replied, "fresh". 

"The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains the same, exactly the same. But the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. When you are in pain, the only thing you do is to enlarge your sense of things... Stop being a glass... Become a lake". 

Reflecting on this, I’m warmed. What a reminder of the many benefits pain provides us. Like salt, pain is not simply a bad thing. It is not wrong to feel or something we should try to wiggle out of. It's not something we should fear, distract ourselves from, or keep in private. Like salt, it can be incredibly healing to take in. It's NECESSARY for health and wellness. It's necessary for growth, it's used to clean wounds after all. There are many benefits to consuming salt as long as it’s done so with awareness.

Similarly, pain can be a very healing part of our lives. Though unpleasant, if you look back on times of pain you can probably identify major growth you experienced in that time. How do we use our pain to grow and strengthen parts of ourselves?

It's useful to watch yourself in pain... lovingly. How do you distract from it? How do you be with it? How do you lean on others or lean on staying busy? Can you be with it? Be still in it? After we've exhausted the distractions available to us, stayed busy to mask the pain of it, can we find a warm and healing flame in the quiet moments we so greatly fear? Can we tenderly touch this pain, this discomfort and give air to it? Not for it to burn into a reckless and uncontrollable fire, but a hot and contained one. Alchemy. Transformation. Healing. Growth. This is where we practice being human. We understand there will be much more pain, more more grief, and we can be in it. We are nourishing our future selves and deepening our ability to be with others in pain. 

So just stay here. Make space. Don't focus only on the pain that is here but expand your awareness wider. Allow yourself to feel love, happiness, excitement and also deep sorry, fear, grief. Become a lake. Hold them both. Help those around you to do this, too by not trying to remove their pain. Not trying to distract them away from the pain they feel. Not trying to nullify it. Let them feel pain even when you’re having a good time, even though they’re grateful for other aspects of life.