We Dance While We Ache
Pain and pleasure are not mutually exclusive and I don't know how we are going to sustain ourselves individually and collectively if we don't dance
We Dance While We Ache
Recently I realized that I have a combative relationship with disappointment. I hate feeling disappointment and I have a hard time handling it in other people. To be dissappointed brings up feelings of being trapped in the feeling turned resentment turned rage, piled high, and screaming out, wanting to hurt, determined to hate.
When it comes to disappointment, there is a lot of pain there. Because there is a lot of pain, during challenging times, it is easy for all of my practices of mindfulness and compassion to be overshadowed by my default way of moving through the world which is to force hard feelings into submission by way of critique and control.
This default of micromanaging my life to evade pain gives me a false, yet familiar, sense of agency. If I could just figure out and out and out, I think, pulling on an invisible thread, I could find some reprieve from the ache.
As this is my default, I have been doing some kind of compuls…