It's almost impossible to see myself as I was, but every once in a while I get a glimpse of myself in the past. I hear something I said and can only shake my head at how misguided or arrogant or self-serving. Oh, sister, you have a lot to learn. I don't mind these recollections, in fact I treasure them because they show me how far I've come. I may still have buckets of arrogance and judgment inside, but I know for a fact that I can say - without pride! with all humility! - that there's much less of it. And I like to see that, because it's so easy to say that I haven't changed, that I'm fighting the same old battles, trying to break free of the same old chains.
The fact is I'm not the young woman who was full of pride and thought she was right about everything. Life has done to me what it does to everyone - it's brought times of suffering, and the need to find a way out of suffering made me willing to admit I couldn't change circumstances outside me and I couldn't fix me. I began to understand that the particulars of the challenges I face usually aren't as important as the fact that I face them. I began to understand that if I was open to a wider meaning than the needs and wants of my own little ego I could think of my experience as grist for the mill of my liberation. Spiritual freedom became the goal and suffering was a means to that end. My belief in spiritual freedom brought suffering down to size. The desire to learn how to navigate my way through pain and how to let go of all the things that blocked me was greater, larger than my suffering. There was now a purpose to my pain; the lessons of pain, learning how to surrender it, helped me toward freedom.
When your life has a purpose, a meaning deeper than surface thoughts, actions and feelings, you can bear whatever life brings. You can't escape pain but you can see its uses. You can let it teach you all it has to offer.
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