Cracked Pot Meditations – You Can’t Escape Pain

Meditation for April 20th

You Can’t Escape Pain

There are many life events we face that cause 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 our past. Even just being broke and wondering where your next meal will come from is painful. Just being aware of the world around us can cause pain, especially if we are empathetic.

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. 

Because there are more things now than ever before that help escape pain, we have a hard time differentiating between pain and inconvenience. Society and the Internet make 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 us down in 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, justifying past injustices, 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 in and out to ‘With or Without You’ by U2 without breaking down in tears. 

Just wait. 

But if you don’t feel any pain right now, wait, you will soon.

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. 

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

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

Oh, well. 

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

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 the 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 partner after a breakup, and it is 4 hours for a friend who decides they can’t have you in their life anymore. 

Also, keep everyone you and the bereaved know updated on the bereaved’s 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. 

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 any time with anyone, so when they leave, by mortality or by physical geography, you won’t feel anything.