Megan Devine Quotes

When you try to take someone's pain away from them, you don't make it better. You just tell them it's not OK to talk about their pain.

There is not a reason for everything. Not every loss can be transformed into something useful. Things happen that do not have a silver lining.

Grief is visceral, not reasonable: the howling at the center of grief is raw and real. It is love in its most wild form.

The reality of grief is far different from what others see from the outside. There is pain in this world that you can't be cheered out of. You don't need solutions. You don't need to move on from your grief. You need someone to see your grief, to acknowledge it. You need someone to hold your hands while you stand there in blinking horror, staring at the hole that was your life. Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.

True comfort in grief is in acknowledging the pain, not in trying to make it go away. Companionship, not correction, is the way forward.

Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.

When someone you love dies, you don't just lose them in the present or in the past. You lose the future you should have had, and might have had, with them. They are missing from all the life that was to be.

Every loss is valid. And every loss is not the same. You can't flatten the landscape of grief and say that everything is equal. It isn't.

There are losses that rearrange the world. Deaths that change the way you see everything, grief that tears everything down. Pain that transports you to an entirely different universe, even while everyone else thinks nothing has really changed.

Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.

Acknowledgment--being seen and heard and witnessed inside the truth about one's own life--is the only real medicine of grief.

The cult of positivity we have does everyone a disservice. It leads us to believe we’re more in charge of the world than we are, and holds us responsible for every pain and heartbreak we endure. It sets up a one-false-move world, in which we must be careful not to upset the gods, or karma, or our bodies with our thoughts and intentions.

Some things cannot be fixed; they can only be carried. Grief like yours, love like yours, can only be carried. Survival in grief, even eventually building a new life alongside grief, comes with the willingness to bear witness, both to yourself and to the others who find themselves inside this life they didn’t see coming. Together, we create real hope for ourselves, and for one another. We need each other to survive. I wish this for you: to find the people you belong with, the ones who will see your pain, companion you, hold you close, even as the heavy lifting of grief is yours alone. As hard as they may seem to find at times, your community is out there. Look for them. Collect them. Knit them into a vast flotilla of light that can hold you.

Grief is not a sign that you’re unwell or unevolved. It’s a sign that love has been part of your life, and that you want love to continue, even here.

Grief can be incredibly lonely. Even when people show up and love you as best they can, they aren’t really with you in this. They can’t be. It so very much sucks that, in large part, you are in this alone. And also, you can’t do this alone.

If you can't tell your story to another human, find another way: journal, paint, make your grief into a graphic novel with a very dark storyline. Or go out to the woods and tell the trees. It is an immense relief to be able to tell your story without someone trying to fix it. The trees will not ask, "How are you really?" and the wind doesn't care if you cry.

Here’s the thing: no matter what your anxiety tells you, rehearsing disaster will not make you safe. Repeatedly checking in with people to be sure they’re still safe will never create a lasting sense of safety.

Here is what grieving people want you to know: We love you. We still love you, even if our lives have gone completely dark, and you can’t seem to reach us. Please stay.

Not everyone deserves to hear your grief. Not everyone is capable of hearing it. Just because someone is thoughtful enough to ask doesn't mean you are obliged to answer.

What we all share in common - the real reason for this book - is a desire to love better. To love ourselves in the midst of great pain, and to love another when the pain of this life grows too large for one person to hold. This book offers the skills needed to make that kind of love a reality.

Grief is not a problem to be solved; it’s an experience to be carried.

Love with open hands, with an open heart, knowing that what is given to you will die. It will change. Love anyway. You witness incredible pain in this life. Love anyway.

What we need to remember -- as a working practice -- is to honor all griefs. Honor all losses, small and not small. Life changing and moment changing. And then, not to compare them. That all people experience pain is not medicine for anything.

To feel truly comforted by someone, you need to feel heard in your pain. You need the reality of your loss reflected back to you—not diminished, not diluted. It seems counterintuitive, but true comfort in grief is in acknowledging the pain, not in trying to make it go away.

We need to talk about the hierarchy of grief. You hear it all the time—no grief is worse than any other. I don’t think that’s one bit true. There is a hierarchy of grief. Divorce is not the same as the death of a partner. Death of a grandparent is not the same as the death of a child. Losing your job is not the same as losing a limb. Here’s the thing: every loss is valid. And every loss is not the same. You can’t flatten the landscape of grief and say that everything is equal. It isn’t. It’s easier to see when we take it out of the intensely personal: stubbing your toe hurts. It totally hurts. For a moment, the pain can be all-consuming. You might even hobble for a while. Having your foot ripped off by a passing freight train hurts, too. Differently. The pain lasts longer. The injury needs recovery time, which may be uncertain or complicated. It affects and impacts your life moving forward. You can’t go back to the life you had before you became a one-footed person. No one would say these two injuries are exactly the same.

It seems counterintuitive, but the way to truly be helpful to someone in pain is to let them have their pain. Let them share the reality of how much this hurts, how hard this is, without jumping in to clean it up, make it smaller, or make it go away.

Think of it like this: your grieving person spoke a language that only one other person in the world spoke, and that person died. It’s tempting to ask the grieving person to teach you that language so that you can speak it to them.

Grief is as individual as love. That someone has experienced a loss—even one similar to yours—does not mean they understand you.

Grief never really stops. It is something you carry with you in different ways.

You are alone in your grief. You alone carry the knowledge of how your grief lives in you. You alone know all the details, the subtlety and nuance of what’s happened and what’s been lost. You alone know how deeply your life has been changed. You alone have to face this, inside your own heart. No one can do this with you.

That hole torn in the universe will not just close back up so that you can go back to normal. No matter what happens next in your life, it will never be adequate compensation. The life you lost can’t come back. That loss can’t be regained.

We've got this idea that there are only two options in grief: you're either going to be stuck in your pain, doomed to spend the rest of your life rocking in a corner in your basement wearing sackcloth, or you're going to triumph over grief, be transformed, and come back even better than you were before. Just two options. On, off. Eternally broken or completely healed. It doesn't seem to matter that nothing else in life is like that. Somehow when it comes to grief, the entire breadth of human experience goes out the window.

No matter what the deeper reasons are, the loss of friends you thought would stand by you through thick and thin is an added heartbreak. The injustice of these second losses makes grief itself that much more difficult.

Grief is not an enlightenment program for a select few. No one needs intense, life-changing, loss to become whoever they are "meant" to be. The universe is not causal in that way: you need to become something, so life gives you this horrible experience in order to make it happen.

Things like "Everything happens for a reason" and "You'll become a stronger/kinder/more compassionate person because of this" brings out rage in grieving people. Nothing makes a person angrier than when they know they're being insulted but can't figure out how. It's not just erasing your current pain that makes words of comfort land so badly. There's a hidden subtext in those statements about becoming a better, kinder, and more compassionate because of your loss, that often-used phrase about knowing what's "truly important in life" now that you've learned how quickly life can change. The unspoken second half of the sentence in this case says you needed this somehow. It says that you weren't aware of what was important in life before this happened. It says that you weren't kind, compassionate, or aware enough in your life before this happened. That you needed this experience in order to develop or grow, that you needed this lesson in order to step into your "true path" in life. As though loss and hardship were the only ways to grow as a human being. As though pain were the only doorway to a better, deeper life, the only way to be truly compassionate and kind.

Grief is not a problem. It doesn't need solutions. Seeing grief as an experience that needs support, rather than solutions, changes everything.

There are people who don’t care one bit about your pain, and people who are far more concerned with being seen as helpful and important than they are in actually being helpful.

What has happened cannot be made right. What is lost cannot be restored. There is no beauty here, inside this central fact.

Grief is part of love. Love for life, love for self, love for others. What you are living, painful as it is, is love. And love is really hard. Excruciating at times.

Being brave is staying present to your own heart when that heart is shattered into a million different pieces and can never be made right.

Evidence that they were here, that they lived, that they were part of you is important.

They want the “old” you back, not understanding that that old you can’t come back. That self is gone.

The Gift of Presence, the Perils of Advice,” author and educator Parker Palmer writes, “The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed—to be seen, heard, and companioned exactly as it is. When we make that kind of deep bow to the soul of a suffering person, our respect reinforces the soul’s healing resources, the only resources that can help the sufferer make it through.”1 We

It’s kind of a dorky statement, but it is true that grief rearranges your address book. It’s amazing how many people drop out of your life in the wake of catastrophic loss. People who have been with you through thick and thin suddenly disappear, or turn dismissive, shaming, strange. Random strangers become your biggest, deepest source of comfort, if even only for a few moments.

And one more thing about the grocery store: many people get overwhelmed with all the things they no longer need to buy for the person they lost—there is no need for their favorite cookies or their morning tea.

All those encouragements from others about having so much to live for, that there's still goodness to come in your life --- they feel irrelevant. They kind of are irrelevant. You can't cheerlead yourself out of the depths of grief.

Because of the way grief impacts the mind and cognitive processes, you’ve probably also lost interest in things you used to enjoy, your intellectual faculties may have changed, and your memory and attention span may be virtually nonexistent.

Spiritual bypassing—the use of spiritual beliefs to avoid dealing with painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs—is so pervasive that it goes largely unnoticed. The spiritual ideals of any tradition, whether Christian commandments or Buddhist precepts, can provide easy justification for practitioners to duck uncomfortable feelings in favor of more seemingly enlightened activity. When split off from fundamental psychological needs, such actions often do much more harm than good. ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS, Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters

allow yourself to experiment, to find what helps, to find what makes things just a little easier.

Just because someone is thoughtful enough to ask doesn’t mean you are obliged to answer.

All those mental circuits that used to fire so clearly are trying their best to relate to this entirely changed world.

He had a great life, and you were lucky to have him for as long as you did. Be grateful, and move on.” As though a great life lived makes it OK that that great life is now over.

We need to know how to live here, where life as we know it can change, forever at anytime.

we have outdated beliefs around how long grief should last and what it should look like. We see it as something to overcome, something to fix, rather than something to tend or support.

Grief itself won’t make sense, loss itself will not rearrange into something orderly and sensible, but your mind, and your heart, will adapt. This loss will be absorbed and integrated.

The cult of positivity we have does everyone a disservice. It leads us to believe we’re more in charge of the world than we are, and holds us responsible for every pain and heartbreak we endure.

If your mind is not what it used to be, you’re entirely normal. You are not crazy. You feel crazy because you’re inside a crazy experience. Grief, especially early grief, is not a normal time. It makes perfect sense that your mind doesn’t work the way it used to: everything has changed. Of course you’re disoriented. Your mind is trying to make sense of a world that can no longer make sense.

When you choose to find meaning or growth inside your loss, that’s an act of personal sovereignty and self-knowledge. When someone else ascribes growth or meaning to your loss, it diminishes your power, gives subtle shaming or judgment to who you were before, and tells you that you needed this somehow. No wonder it feels so bad.

The whole idea of getting better—or even integrating your loss—can feel offensive, especially in early grief. Getting better might mean that the person you lost, or the life you no longer get to live, isn’t as important anymore.

The real cutting edge of growth and development is in hurting with each other. It’s in companionship, not correction. Acknowledgment—being seen and heard and witnessed inside the truth about one’s own life—is the only real medicine of grief.

As a culture, we don't want to hear that there are things that can't be fixed. As a culture, we don't want to hear that there is some pain that never gets redeemed. Some things we learn to live with, and that's not the same as everything working out in the end. No matter how many rainbows and butterflies you stick into the narrative, some stories just don't work out.

The love you knew, the love you dreamed of, the love you grew and created together, that is what will get you through. It’s a vast, wide raft that can’t be broken or depleted. You might forget it’s there sometimes, but you can always come back to it.

Grieving people are met with impatience precisely because they are failing the cultural storyline of overcoming adversity. If you don’t “transform,” if you don’t find something beautiful inside this, you’ve failed. And if you don’t do it quickly, following that narrative arc from incident to transformation within our collective attention span, you’re not living the right story.

For most people, “not being stuck” means that the person has gone back to work, regained their sense of humor, attends social events, doesn’t cry every day, and is able to talk about things other than their loss or their grief. They seem . . . happy again.

I wrote to make connection inside grief easier to find. I created things—books, blog posts, courses, workshops—because if I could do anything to make this load lighter and less lonely for anyone, one person or a thousand—I had to. What else could I possibly do?

To do grief well depends solely on individual experience. It means listening to your own reality. It means acknowledging pain and love and loss. It means allowing the truth of these things the space to exist without any artificial tethers or stages or requirements

Grief is already a lonely experience. It rearranges your address book: people you thought would stay beside you through anything have either disappeared or they’ve behaved so badly, you cut them out yourself. Even those who truly love you, who want more than anything to stay beside you, fall short of joining you here. It can feel like you lost the entire world right along with the person who died.

While it may not always be this acutely heavy, your grief, like your love, will always be part of you. Life can be, and even likely will be, beautiful again. But that is a life built alongside loss, informed by beauty and grace as much as by devastation, not one that seeks to erase it.

Think of it like this: your grieving person spoke a language that only one other person in the world spoke, and that person died. It’s tempting to ask the grieving person to teach you that language so that you can speak it to them. No matter how much you want to speak to them, to give them back what they’ve lost, they can’t teach you the language. Coming out of their pain to teach you syntax and grammar and vocabulary so that they can then return to their mute state is simply impossible. They cannot do it. They cannot access that part of their mind that forms lessons and offers feedback.

Do not start any sentences with the phrase “at least,” for you will then witness my miraculous transformation into Grief Warrior. I will spout grief theory at you, tell you that Kübler-Ross was misinterpreted, that there is no timeline, no road or path in grief. We are all on our own here, in the gloom.

Finding that middle ground is the real work of grief—my work, and yours. Each of us, each one of us, has to find our way into that middle ground. A place that doesn’t ask us to deny our grief and doesn’t doom us forever. A place that honors the full breadth of grief, which is really the full breadth of love.

This is not how you thought it would be. Time has stopped. Nothing feels real. Your mind cannot stop replaying the events, hoping for a different outcome. The ordinary, everyday world that others still inhabit feels coarse and cruel. You can’t eat (or you eat everything). You can’t sleep (or you sleep all the time). Every object in your life becomes an artifact, a symbol of the life that used to be and might have been. There is no place this loss has not touched. In the days and weeks since your loss, you’ve heard all manner of things about your grief: They wouldn’t want you to be sad. Everything happens for a reason. At least you had them as long as you did. You’re strong and smart and resourceful—you’ll get through this! This experience will make you stronger. You can always try again—get another partner, have another child, find some way to channel your pain into something beautiful and useful and good. Platitudes and cheerleading solve nothing. In fact, this kind of support only makes you feel like no one in the world understands. This isn’t a paper cut. It’s not a crisis of confidence. You didn’t need this thing to happen in order to know what’s important, to find your calling, or even to understand that you are, in fact, deeply loved. Telling the truth about grief is the only way forward: your loss is exactly as bad as you think it is. And people, try as they might, really are responding to your loss as poorly as you think they are. You aren’t crazy. Something crazy has happened, and you’re responding as any sane person would.

We’re not here to fix our pain, but to tend to it.” The truth is that those who suffer carry a wisdom that the rest of us need. And given that we live in a society that is afraid to feel, it’s important to open each other to the depth of the human journey, which can only be known through the life of our feelings.

Like many grieving people, we stopped talking about our pain to friends and family. It was easier to pretend everything was fine than to continually defend and explain our grief to those who couldn’t understand. We turned to other grieving people because they were the only ones who knew what grief was really like.

By simply stating the truth, we open conversations about grief, which are really conversations about love. We start to love one another better. We begin to overhaul the falsely redemptive storyline that has us, as a culture and as individuals, insist that there's a happy ending everywhere if only we look hard enough. We stop blaming each other for our pain, and instead, work together to change what can be changed, and withstand what can't be fixed. We get more comfortable with hearing the truth, even when the truth breaks our hearts.

I’ve been the person howling on the floor, unable to eat or to sleep, unable to tolerate leaving the house for more than a few minutes at a time.

You need someone to hold your hands while you stand there in blinking horror, staring at the hole that was your life. Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.

It’s like we just can’t reconcile the fact that someone could be alive and well at breakfast and dead by lunch.

Especially when the loss is unusual, violent, or accidental, the backlash of blame is intense: we immediately point out what someone else did wrong.

We need to find ways to share in the shattering experience of loss—in our own lives and in the larger world.

The real path here, the real way forward, is not in denying that irredeemable pain exists, but by acknowledging that it does.

We're not here to fix our pain, but to tend to it

There is pain in this world that you can’t be cheered out of. You don’t need solutions. You don’t need to move on from your grief. You need someone to see your grief, to acknowledge it.

Spiritual practices in any tradition, including mindfulness in its many forms, are meant to help you live what is yours to live, not make you rise above it. These tools are meant to help you feel companioned inside your grief. They're meant to give you a tiny bit of breathing room inside what is wholly unbearable. That's not at all the same thing as making your pain go away.

Our culture sees grief as a kind of malady: a terrifying, messy emotion that needs to be cleaned up and put behind us as soon as possible. As a result, we have outdated beliefs around how long grief should last and what it should look like. We see it as something to overcome, something to fix, rather than something to tend or support. Even our clinicians are trained to see grief as a disorder rather than a natural response to deep loss. When the professionals don’t know how to handle grief, the rest of us can hardly be expected to respond with skill and grace.

life is call-and-response. Things happen, and we absorb and adapt. We respond to what we experience, and that is neither good nor bad. It simply is. The path forward is integration, not betterment.

Feeling like you’d rather not wake up in the morning is normal in grief, and it doesn’t mean you’re suicidal. Not wanting to be alive is not the same thing as wanting to be dead. It’s hard to tell non-grieving people that, though, as people understandably get worried about your safety. And because people tend to get upset when we talk about not wanting to be alive, we just stop talking about it altogether.

We don’t lie to ourselves well. Unaddressed and unacknowledged pain doesn’t go away. It attempts to be heard in any way it can, often manifesting in substance addiction, anxiety and depression, and social isolation.

Grief is not an enlightenment program for a select few. No one needs intense, life-changing loss to become who they are “meant” to be. The universe is not causal in that way: you need to become something, so life gives you this horrible experience in order to make it happen. On the contrary: life is call-and-response. Things happen, and we absorb and adapt. We respond to what we experience, and that is neither good nor bad. It simply is.

Virgil tells him, “You have no choice. It is the fire that will burn but not consume.” Dante is still afraid. Sensing this, Virgil puts his hand on his shoulder and repeats, “You have no choice.” Dante then summons his courage and enters.

The people I love, the ones I will go to again and again, are the ones who do not in any way try to “solve” this for me, or fix it, or fix me. They do not make any attempt to cheer me up, or shame me into feeling thankful that I had as much love as I did, and so should be happy with that. They do not tell me things will be better “later,” and that I have so much to live for. They do not remind me I am part of the cycle of life. As though that matters, all that pandering, condescending crap.

Traumatized human beings recover in the context of relationships: with families, loved ones, AA meetings, veterans’ organizations, religious communities, or professional therapists. The role of those relationships is to provide physical and emotional safety, including safety from feeling shamed, admonished, or judged, and to bolster the courage to tolerate, face, and process the reality of what has happened. BESSEL VAN DER KOLK, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

That hole torn in the universe will not just close back up so that you can go back to normal. No matter what happens next in your life, it will never be adequate compensation. The life you lost can’t come back. That loss can’t be regained. By definition then, there is absolutely no point in time when you will “recover” from such a loss. And that makes it tricky. If there is no “healing” in terms of being as good as new, if we can’t “recover” any more than someone who has lost their legs can simply will them to grow back, how do we go on?

Kübler-Ross wrote that she regretted writing the stages the way that she did, that people mistook them as being both linear and universal. The stages of grief were not meant to tell anyone what to feel and when exactly they should feel it. They were not meant to dictate whether you are doing your grief “correctly” or not. Her stages, whether applied to the dying or those left living, were meant to normalize and validate what someone might experience in the swirl of insanity that is loss and death and grief. They were meant to give comfort, not create a cage.

If we want to care for one another better, we have to rehumanize grief. We have to talk about it. We have to understand it as a natural, normal process, rather than something to be shunned, rushed, or maligned. We have to start talking about the real skills needed to face the reality of living a life entirely changed by loss.

Our culture sees grief as a kind of malady: a terrifying, messy emotion that needs to be cleaned up and put behind us as soon as possible. As a result, we have outdated beliefs around how long grief should last and what it should look like. We see it as something to overcome, something to fix, rather than something to tend or support.

Sovereignty is the state of having authority over your own life, making decisions based on your own knowledge of yourself, free of outside rule or domination. We're such an opinion-giving culture; it can be hard to remember that each person is an expert in their own life. Other people may have insight, but the right to claim the meaning of your life belongs solely to you. Because I am so sensitive to ideas of sovereignty and self-authority, any outside person telling me what my own recovery might look like is going to be met with irritation. But if I do the asking, if I wonder - for myself - what healing or recovery might look like, then it becomes a very different question. It comes down to this: If you choose something for yourself, as a way of living this grief, it's perfect and beautiful. If something - even the very same thing - is foisted upon you by an outside force, it's probably not going to feel very good. The difference is in who claims it as the "correct" choice.

And I would love a cup of coffee, if you don’t mind, delivered to Mr. Turner’s office?” He had the audacity to give her a wink on the way out. “Black if you will.” Oh, I will. She stared as he disappeared down the hall, stunned as always by the bold confidence of Devin Caldwell, the runt in the sixth grade whose life changed forever when he started to grow. “Black as night,” she muttered, rattled by his good looks and towering height, which were exceeded only by his cockiness. “Right around the eye . . .” Megan

Being brave is about waking to face each day when you would rather just stop waking up. Being brave is staying present to your own heart when that heart is shattered into a million different pieces and can never be made right. Being brave is standing at the edge of the abyss that just opened in someone’s life and not turning away from it, not covering your discomfort with a pithy “think positive” emoticon. Being brave is letting pain unfurl and take up all the space it needs. Being brave is telling that story. It’s terrifying. And it’s beautiful.

For physical issues, we have an entire pharmacopoeia of pain medicine. For the actual pain of grief, we have . . . nothing. It’s always seemed so bizarre to me that we have an answer for almost every physical pain, but for this—some of the most intense pain we can experience—there is no medicine. You’re just supposed to feel it. And in a way, that’s true. The answer to pain is simply to feel it. Some traditions speak of practicing compassion in the face of pain, rather than trying to fix it. As I understand the Buddhist teaching, the fourth form of compassion in the Brahma Viharas, or the four immeasurables, describes an approach to the kinds of pain that cannot be fixed: upekkha, or equanimity. Upekkha is the practice of staying emotionally open and bearing witness to the pain while dwelling in equanimity around one’s limited ability to effect change. This form of compassion—for self, for others—is about remaining calm enough to feel everything, to remain calm while feeling everything, knowing that it can’t be changed. Equanimity (upekkha) is said to be the hardest form of compassion to teach, and the hardest to practice. It’s not, as is commonly understood, equanimity in the way of being unaffected by what’s happened, but more a quality of clear, calm attention in the face of immoveable truth. When something cannot be changed, the “enlightened” response is to pay attention. To feel it. To turn toward it and say, “I see you.” That’s the big secret of grief: the answer to the pain is in the pain. Or, as e. e. cummings wrote, healing of the wound is to be sought in the blood of the wound itself. It seems too intangible to be of use, but by allowing your pain to exist, you change it somehow. There’s power in witnessing your own pain. The challenge is to stay present in your heart, to your heart, to your own deep self, even, and especially, when that self is broken. Pain wants to be heard. It deserves to be heard. Denying or minimizing the reality of pain makes it worse. Telling the truth about the immensity of your pain—which is another way of paying attention—makes things different, if not better. It’s important to find those places where your grief gets to be as bad as it is, where it gets to suck as much as it does. Let your pain stretch out. Take up all the space it needs. When so many others tell you that your grief has to be cleaned up or contained, hearing that there is enough room for your pain to spread out, to unfurl—it’s healing. It’s a relief. The more you open to your pain, the more you can just be with it, the more you can give yourself the tenderness and care you need to survive this. Your pain needs space. Room to unfold. I think this is why we seek out natural landscapes that are larger than us. Not just in grief, but often in grief. The expanding horizon line, the sense of limitless space, a landscape wide and deep and vast enough to hold what is—we need those places. Sometimes grief like yours cannot be held by the universe itself. True. Sometimes grief needs more than an endless galaxy. Maybe your pain could wrap around the axle of the universe several times. Only the stars are large enough to take it on. With enough room to breathe, to expand, to be itself, pain softens. No longer confined and cramped, it can stop thrashing at the bars of its cage, can stop defending itself against its right to exist. There isn’t anything you need to do with your pain. Nothing you need to do about your pain. It simply is. Give it your attention, your care. Find ways to let it stretch out, let it exist. Tend to yourself inside it. That’s so different from trying to get yourself out of it. The way to come to pain is with open eyes, and an open heart, committed to bearing witness to your own broken place. It won’t fix anything. And it changes everything.