Transforming Pain to Joy

Before we can begin to understand the suffering of the world, we need to understand it within ourselves. If we run every time we experience difficult emotions, or escape through distractions or perhaps intoxicants, we will never come to enough understanding of emotional suffering to take on another’s suffering unto ourselves.

In the same vein, if we cannot comprehend our own joy, and understanding how to find joy within the simple things of life, we can never pass this on to others.

This implies inviting unwanted situations into our world, first so that we may understand suffering and secondly so that we can give back joy. This is a call to meditation practice – to sit with all of our emotions – and welcome unto ourselves the ugly uncomfortableness of life.

Osho says:

“First experience [pain] in its total intensity. It will be difficult, it will be heart-rending: you may start crying like a child, you may start rolling on the ground in deep pain; your body may go through contortions. You may suddenly become aware that the pain is not only in the heart, it is all over the body - that it is aching all over, that it is painful all over, that the body is nothing but pain.

If you can experience it - this is of tremendous importance - then start absorbing it...Absorb it, drink it, accept it, welcome it, feel grateful to it. It may take a few days for you to be able to digest it, but the day it happens, you have stumbled upon a door which will take you really far away. A new journey has started in your life, you are moving into a new kind of being - because immediately, the moment you accept the pain with no rejection anywhere, its energy and its quality changes. It is no longer pain.

In fact one is simply surprised, one cannot believe it, it is so incredible. One cannot believe that suffering can be transformed into ecstasy, that pain can become joy.

Whenever anything is total it transforms into its opposite. This is a great secret to be remembered...You will not believe it when it happens the first time, that your own suffering absorbed willingly, welcomingly, becomes a great blessing. The same energy that becomes hate becomes love, the same energy that becomes pain becomes pleasure, the same energy that becomes suffering becomes bliss.”

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