On the Wounds of Love: Part Four – Marc Gafni

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On the Wounds of Love: Part Four

We long for certainty. But are we ever really certain of the correctness of our ideas about how the world should be? In moments of hurt and blame, if we can step out of our frame and go deeper, we might identify that behind our need to blame someone–even ourselves–for our pain is a feeling of being alone, of being cut off and isolated from the rest of reality. As we look into that deeper place then we might–often for the first time–be able to watch how the mechanism of ego works.

And we might also notice how we quickly–almost desperately–move to cover over that isolated feeling. If we look closely, we might realize that when we feel cut off, separate diminished or abandoned, we often move to secure our version of how we would like the world to be.

Sometimes simply seeing the ego at work, relaxing the struggle, and opening to the truth of the moment liberates our awareness. But in order for this to happen, we need the courage to be present with our own emotional and physical pain. In bioenergetics, and in certain traditions of tantric yoga, we are shown how to free pain through the body by breathing into the fullness of sensation, and feeling the alive quality in the sensation of pain itself. A yogini friend of mine once said, “Because you say “ow” instead of “ah”–because the sensation appears as a menace instead of a friend–doesn’t mean it’s not from the same source.” All phenomena
arise from this same source, and the body itself is made of the substance of God.

To recognize the divine substance in pain allows us to be present to it rather than resisting or fearing it. Normally (and naturally) we seek to assuage and heal pain–the body itself produces hormones whose very purpose is to make pain bearable. To heal the pain of an other is the sacred joy and obligation of every individual. Even so, we sometimes need to be careful not to numb our pain so quickly that it cannot give us its teaching. According to the mystics this was the meaning of Job’s teaching when he defiantly asserted, “Through my Body I Vision God.” Job– the archetypal sufferer–teaches the Yoga of entering the body in order to walk through, not around, our pain. “I am in your pain” cries out the divine, through the lips of Isaiah. The words of the prophet resonate with particular poignancy regarding emotional pain–the pain of eros. There is a divinity to be realized in staying open to the pain of Eros.

We need to resist the seduction of closing off into the easy certainties of psychological dogma, explaining how some demonized other is the source of our pain. If the skew of earlier times was to close our heart by blaming the victim, then the sin of our times is in the assuaging of our own guilt through the deification of the alleged victim’s pain. Does our heart become so hardened that all counter narratives are reviled, crushed or simply ignored? Do we allow the powerful to masquerade as the powerless, and unjust pain beyond all measure is meted out simply because we refuse to challenge the idolatry of hurt.

We need the capacity to sustain uncertainty without being psychologically seduced to adopt any dogmatic certainty about the way things are or ought to be, without choosing sides by asserting that someone is bad and someone else good. The capacity to hold open awareness within uncertainty, resisting the subtle but powerful impulse to close into one version of reality, is the gateway to enlightenment.

All the great traditions of spirit, in their own way, show us that everything is one thing. Everything is one beautiful, radical, unknowable, ungraspable, vast, empty gorgeousness. Nothing, absolutely nothing needs to be rejected. But only a lover is willing to look directly into the eyes of reality, and see things exactly as they are. When we talk about spiritual courage–this is what we mean. When we talk about being a lover–this is what we mean. We do our best to embrace everything exactly as it is–in excruciating, gorgeous detail. We pay attention to all the ways we hide, slink away, or build up a solid story of breach and betrayal to assuage our feelings. Yet it is only when we give up our insistence on being right that we can
begin to be alive and aligned.

There is a time to wield Gabriel’s sword and demand justice. And there is a moment when our spiritual training instructs us to surrender instead, to let go, to relinquish our ideas, and to breathe into the unwanted sensations. Much as we would like to simply transcend devastating erotic experience, love tells us that the only way out is through. We cannot transcend painful experiences without going through them, without becoming them.

Hafiz says that:

“Love is the funeral pyre

Where the heart must lay


Its body.”

Marc Gafni

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