Sit With Your Discomfort

SPIRITUALITY

Pollinate Sunday Sermon, 12.19.21

Happy Sunday before Winter Solstice. I hope this finds you thriving in some discomfort as this is the season for doing so.

I found myself in an isle at Target for the fifth time in a week. This time I was buying colorful throw pillows. It was no accident. The half an hour drive into town, the subsequent meandering around the store and the eventual purchase, had become a ritual in the months after my dad died. It gave me something to do with my brain and something to help me avoid my pain. At the tender age of 21 I hadn’t developed any tools other than these to cope with the grief bearing down on me. In addition to the distraction, the high of buying something broke through the wall of despair I was carrying around inside of myself, if only for a little while. That felt like enough to justify the loads of cash I was spending, and frankly no one was going to bust my balls for shopping. I could hide my fetal attempt to avoid my emotional collapse in plain sight; sometimes even my own.

Whether it’s shopping, binge eating or not eating at all, consuming a bottle of wine every evening with a side of anti-depressant medication or spending hours in the gym driving your body to exhaustion, we’ve become experts at avoiding our pain and we’re wholeheartedly supported in doing so by the society we’ve constructed around us. ‘Stay Calm and Carry On’ has been tattooed across our psyche as a constant rejection of our soul’s desire to do one thing — feel the pain.

Have you ever pressed on a bruise or been asked by a doctor to indicate the level and location of pain you’re experiencing in your body? These actions indicate pain’s fundamental purpose in our lives. It is a language of its own, telling us where we need attention, where to find the wound and where to water our soul. Pain’s voice rises in the body. She will always speak there first. There’s a reason you don’t FEEL like eating or are still exhausted after sleeping all day. Pain is talking to us in our muscles and stomach. The question is: do we have the ears to hear?

In her groundbreaking book ‘Wintering,’ Katherine May explores the idea of what our world would look if we made space for our pain, as both an acute proposition and a…

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