Throw away the pain...

Everyone has had a bad experience in life. I'm not talking about something embarrassing, but an actual painful point in their life. I want to here what you have to say by giving one word to sum it up, and a brief summary of the experience. If this is too personal nobody has to do it, but it's like a therapy of sorts. Where you get to put all the pain out here and maybe it will help you heal (if I'm making sense) We are all part of this community and all support one another. I'll even start it out.

Betrayal: Recently, about 9 months ago, my estranged, drug addicted father kicked me out of the house. He beat me and emotionally abused me before that. I was never really close to him, because I live with my mother in the worst conditions and never met him untill she died when I was 7 and he came to get me. Even then he was distant and abusive. But he was all I had. He would leave me at home and party for days. That was my normal life so it didn't effect me hard because I never had a loving parent. Even though with all that, I at least had a father, even if he wasn't a "dad". Then he got a girlfriend and a new house and I was left with even less of him then I had. One day he decided that he wanted to start fresh....without me. So now I say that I can try to be my own dad, by being a good man and doing what he never tried to do. That's my pain.....and I'm throwing it away.

Recently I was at a lecture by Neil deGrasse Tyson. During the Q & A, a question was posed to Mr. Tyson about what, if anything, he regret about his high school years. His answer was so appropriate for us as Jedi. In summary he stated this:

I do not regret any part of my life. Everything I experienced has made me the man I am today. I have not forgotten these experiences, but I do not what to relive them. I cherish them for what I have learned, and for what I have become because of these experiences.

There is no way in which I can relate any experience of my, that would compare to what you have lived through. I can offer you empathy and compassion and these simple words…

If we do not know how to turn your own suffering into a favorable circumstance for our own awakening, if we cannot cultivate the depth of our own intelligence, if we cannot change our own conditions of being an ignorant person to an awakened one…
Who can do it for us? If not in this life then it will never be done!
Buddha

Be proud of what you have accomplished in life and how your path has lead you here!

May the Force grant you favor and keep you safe!

As with Ferriere, betrayal. Three years ago, I was an IT Administrator for the local prison, engaged to a beautiful woman who was pregnant with my child, a daughter. Sadly, this picture of perfection was not as it seemed. My ex-fiance had been sleeping with my supervisor (although it was later proved that he is sterile, so there's no doubt that the child would have been mine), who then decided to fabricate evidence that eventually led to my dismissal. A week after I had lost my job, my ex-fiance left me (with five weeks left to go until the wedding, that I had spent my life savings on). I wasn't upset that she had left me. I was upset because I didn't want my daughter to grow up in a broken home. My ex-fiance saw to that as well.

Two weeks after she left me, I get a phone call from a good friend of mine that works at the local hospital, telling me that my ex-fiance is in the hospital. Apparently, she had intentionally overdosed on her anxiety medication with the express purpose of miscarrying my daughter.

I spent 6 months after finding that out completely silent. I didn't say a word to anyone, not even my family. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what to think. Then, six months to the day my daughter died, it hit me. I didn't have to do anything. I didn't have to say anything. I didn't have to think anything. What happened, happened. I could no more change it than change the color of my skin or the distance from here to the sun. All I could do was accept that it had happened and do my best to live a life that my daughter would have been proud of.

Taking refuge here means surrendering hope rather than fear. When we give up promises, possibilities, and potentials, then we begin to realize that there is no burden of further imprisonment. We can be completely freed even from hope!

-Buddhist Monk

There are plenty of pains in my past, but there's nothing more for me to gain from them as I've grown beyond them...they've made me who I am....the abuse during childhood, the bullying, the death of 2 brothers, the cheating girlfriend....

my father had an excellent metaphor of pain

he told me " Imagine life is a blacksmith, we are it's sword, fresh from the forge, but life knows we are not as strong as we could or meant to be, so life takes his hammer ( pain) and he beats us, he beats his new forged sword. Does he do this to break us? to do nothing but hurt us? no, life beats us to make us stronger. A sword would be nothing like it is without the hammer that strengthened it, don't throw away the pain, accept it.