Facets of a Diamond - Blog

The Australian psychiatrist Ainslie Meares wrote of visiting a 134-year-old yogi who meditated sixteen hours a day on a mountain top. He asked him if he felt pain. “Yes of course I do”—but then he added “but it doesn’t hurt.” Pain is a concomitant, an essential concomitant, of life. I like to think of all pains as growing pains. But hurt is quite different—it is superadded to the pain. And the hurt always relates to not feeling loved, basically by our mothers.

The saying “No pain—no gain” is correct. For pain is our growth, pain is our evolution. Pain is the working of the Tao. Most complain not of the pain—but of the superadded hurt—which is felt as abuse. And if there is hurt, there is no gain. I realized I was stopping a stretching exercise not for what I thought was the pain, but what really was merely hurt. When I then would see my mother smiling on me, the hurt would suddenly vanish and I could stretch quite a bit further. “No hurt—more gain.”

A smile is our reflexive response to feeling smiled on, as a child smiles back to his beaming mother. We can eliminate the component of hurt from pain by realizing that we are smiled on—the Great Spirit, the Mother of All, ever smiling. The yogi had found his mother’s love, he lives in her Belovedness. And so can we all. On this I meditate.