Tag: healing, pain

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Symptoms of illness and distress, plus your feelings about them, can be viewed as messengers coming to tell you something important about your body or about your mind. In the old days, if a king didn’t like the message he was given, he would sometimes have the messenger killed. This is tantamount to suppressing your symptoms or your feelings because they are unwanted. Killing the messenger and denying the message or raging against it are not intelligent ways of approaching healing. The one thing we don’t want to do is to ignore or rupture the essential connections that can complete relevant feedback loops and restore self-regulation and balance. Our real challenge when we have symptoms is to see if we can listen to their message and really hear them and take them to heart, that is, make the connection fully.

Jenna Butler

I think I realized intellectually at that point, watching the city slowly give way to the last vestiges of parkland and then the black spruce forests of the North, that I could come back to the land deeply fearful, or I could choose to see it as a place of healing. Pain colours us; we carry it behind our eyes for a long time after it’s passed. At some point, we have to decide whether we’re willing to let it take over our lives and change them permanently, or whether we’re going to wrench ourselves open again to the world. I couldn’t make that choice in the city.

Jenna Butler

I think I realized intellectually at that point, watching the city slowly give way to the last vestiges of parkland and then the black spruce forests of the North, that I could come back to the land deeply fearful, or I could choose to see it as a place of healing. Pain colours us; we carry it behind our eyes for a long time after it’s passed. At some point, we have to decide whether we’re willing to let it take over our lives and change them permanently, or whether we’re going to wrench ourselves open again to the world. I couldn’t make that choice in the city.