Cracked Pot Meditations – You Can’t Escape Pain

Meditation for April 19th, 2016

You Can’t Escape Pain

There are a lot of things we face that causes us pain. We hurt when we get our hearts broken, or when we lose someone we love or even when we are sick. Emotional pain can come from remembering a painful time in your past. Even just being broke and wondering where your next meal will come from is painful. 

You won’t be able to escape the pain. You can drink for three weeks straight after getting dumped, but when you come to on the 22nd day finally sober, you will feel the pain again. You can dodge the pain for as long as you can, but someday you will have to feel it. 

Society, media and the Internet makes us believe that with a few steps we can evade and ignore pain entirely. In fact we feel less than if we grieve or suffer emotional loss. We are told to get over it in different phrases. You will never escape pain’s cruel clutches. 

We can use drugs, both legally or illegally (or that weird grey area of pharmaceuticals and psychotropic herbs) to shut out that pain, but underneath that euphoria or balanced chemicals in our brains is pain. We can move somewhere far away, far away from the causes and reminders of our pain, but we will find the pain has located us and bogs is down on our feeble attempt at a new life. We can even try therapy and talking about it, but it won’t magically take the pain away. 

Time is the only thing that takes pain away. As long as we aren’t being childish and holding on to past injustces, which most of you do and will, time goes by and the pain isn’t as painful as it once was. It becomes faded and even forgotten. We wake up and realize that the pain of losing someone is no longer tearing at our hearts. We can breathe and listen to ‘With or Wirhout You’ by U2 without breaking down in tears. 

Just wait. 

Prayer

Orcus,

You have taken too many. 

I feel alone,

And I suffer from survivor’s guilt. 

They were so young and full of endless possibilities,

But I am old, bitter and used up.

I no longer have the will to hear another death cry. 

The fact that a person is permanently removed from ever existing in the same reality as us is simply baffling and above all, painful. 

Reject the souls that greet you. 

Send them back up to their bodies,

So that we can have more time. 

I wasted too much time with drama, hating other people, being too cool to do certain activities with my friends, watching g TV, worrying about things I had no power over and trying not to let anyone know me too well. 

I could have spent that time being loving, caring and compassionate. 

Oh, well. 

Hopefully reincarnation is real so I can do this right next time. 

Anguta,

People keep being so sad that people die. 

They need to get used to it. 

People die. 

Lots of people die. 

Old people die from just being too old to need to exist anymore. 

Diseased people die because they just didn’t eat right. 

Junkies die because they want to die. They’d quit junk if they had any desire to live. 

Accidents happen. 

Only the strong survive. 

It was that persons time to go. 

They’re in a better place now. 

This is teaching us a lesson. 

There has been worse deaths. 

Someone more important died. 

I was closer to this person than you. 

There was nothing we could have done. 

They just wouldn’t listen. 

Anyway, I wonder why no one comes to me for grief comfort anymore?

Amen. 

Craft

Here is your handy dandy guide to helping someone grieve or get through a painful situation. 

1. Smother them. Never let them be alone. Sleep in the same bed with them for the next three weeks so they won’t be alone and in pain. 

B. Ask them several times a day if they are ok. If they say ‘fine’ or anything similar, tilt your head and ask, “Are you sure?”

3. Give them advice. Tell them how they should get through this. Talk about diets, rituals, drugs, prayers, letters or a dozen other ways someone could get through pain. 

-Tell them a timeline. Let them know that it is two months for dead parents, six weeks for siblings, one month for close friends, kids are dependent on age and how long you had a chance to bond emotionally but usually three weeks or so, two weeks for romantic loved ones and one week for someone you knew and had positive thoughts about. It is 32 hours for every year you spent with a romantic partner after a break up and it is four hours for a friend who decides they can’t have you in their life anymore. 

Also, keep everyone you and the bereaved updated on the bereaved condition. 

Be mad if the bereaved goes to someone else for comfort and support. 

Goal

Pain is inescapable. No matter what you do or think, you will feel pain. No matter how much you medicate yourself, the pain will bleed through. Nothing takes away pain then feeling it for as long as you need to feel it. 

No one grieves or goes through pain the same way, so no one has to do it the way someone else did. Let people experience their own damn pain. 

Don’t get to know anyone and don’t spend anytime with anyone and so when they leave by mortality or by physical geography, you won’t feel anything.