The cycle.

"All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain...you can obey commandments, believe doctrines, and attend church services all your life and still daily abort your soul if you run from the necessary cycle of loss and renewal..."

"The real point is not an endurance contest, but a course in listening, waiting, and hoping, which has the effect of deepening and clarifying desire."

"...By trying to handle all suffering through willpower, denial, medication, or even therapy, we have forgotten something that should be obvious: we do not handle suffering; suffering handles us - in deep and mysterious ways that become the very matrix of life and especially new life. Only suffering and certain kinds of awe lead us into genuinely new experiences. All the rest is merely the confirmation of old experience."

Richard Rohr
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I desperately want to know what it means to feel life fully, and for that to feel shitty. And not try to fix it. Not try to medicate it.

I'm quick to fix. I long to numb my heart, because I am wired to believe that (lesson after lesson) I somehow deserve pain-free living. That's a lie I tell myself, and in such opposition to this gospel I profess.

When pain comes, I want to yell aloud, also find some stillness, some silence, and listen. I want to learn from the hard lessons, the painful renewal, not just get through it....as I realize that I can only offer to those I love only as far as I have come.