While growth can bring with it an immense amount of pleasure, the truth is that true growth is also immensely painful.
We only have to look at nature to see the truth of this. For the snake, growth means the painful shedding of old skins that no longer serve their expanding life within. For the caterpillar, growth means tasting the terrible uncertainty of the unknown by “dying” into the dark of the chrysalis. And for the young bird, recently hatched from the egg, growth means courageously flying the nest, leaping out of the comfort of the soft and warm and known, feeling the fear and doing it anyway!
Because true growth is always so painful, we so often avoid it, as Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck reminds us:
We must pay the price.
No one but ourselves can ever pay it for us. When I realised that truth it was one of the strong shocks of my lifetime. I finally understood one day that only I can pay the price of realisation: no one, no one at all, can do this for me…
What are some of the ways we evade paying the price? The chief one is our constant unwillingness to bear our own suffering. We think we can evade it or ignore it or think it away, or persuade someone else to remove it for us. We feel that we are entitled not to feel the pain of our lives. We fervently hope and scheme for someone else - our husband or wife, our lover, our child - to handle our pain for us. Such resistance undermines our practice: "I won't sit this morning; I just don't feel like it.' 'I'm not going to do sesshin; I don't like what comes up.' I won't hold my tongue when I'm angry - why should I?' We waver in our integrity when it is painful to maintain it. We give up on a relationship that no longer fulfils our dreams. Underneath all of these evasions is the belief that others should serve us; others should clean up the messes we make.
In fact, nobody - but nobody - can experience our lives for us; nobody can feel for us the pain that life inevitably brings.
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