Wholeness in Pain

Last week, I threw out my back doing physical labor. Prayer and special exercises are helping, but I also notice how quickly my mind turns healing into a project: Did that exercise work? What affirmation or denial will get results? What thoughts held in mind do I need to change?

But Rev. Kelly Isola, drawing deeply from Myrtle Fillmore, offers a very different invitation: stop yearning for a different outcome and become aware of the wholeness that is already here.

That is hard.

Our worldly ways of wanting results insists that something has to change before we can be okay. We look at pain, circumstances, relationships, or ourselves and see what needs fixing. We forget to look beneath the condition and recognize what has never been absent: wholeness, love, peace.

When I manage, even briefly, to stop grasping and striving for a different present-moment experience, I notice a shift. I am able to be fully present to what is in a different way. When the grasping stops, the suffering fades. Pain may still be there. But so is presence.

Nothing else has to change for me to become aware: I am whole right here. Right now. And always.