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My suffering is transformed either on purpose or by accident. It’s usually by accident. It usually involves human connection and moments that remind me what it feels like to be present. An unexpected conversation at a party. A surprise meet up with a beautiful stranger. Or the aftermath of a long sweaty ball-chaffing hike.

But it’s not just enjoying the moment, but also that they’re experiences that put everything into perspective. It’s usually from moments like these that the suffering loses its grip. The pain might remain, but the torture starts to unravel.

When I’m trying to intentionally transform suffering: movement, sitting with it, and some sort of expression usually helps.

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I find that meditating on the source of the pain helps me remove some of the layers that my past trauma and my negative inner narrator are all too ready to weave into the fabric of any new experiences with any hint of negative valence to them.

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Feb 3, 2022Liked by Omar Shaker, Khaled sallam

I’m finding lately that physical activity helps with pain, whether physical or mental pain, since it’s in the body that we feel pain, and the mind extrapolates that pain onto itself. I’m also reading a lot of Alan Watts, especially “The Wisdom of Insecurity”, which is helping me understand that the most acute sensation of pain is the inability to escape it. Prison narratives, like those by Solzhenitsyn, remind me every time I read them how good I objectively have it, and to appreciate the days or even the moments where nothing is wrong. This is all solitary work—the best palliative for me is the company of others, being out in the world, and if not partaking in life, observing it, being surrounded by it, getting to see people go about their day, catching people in the pauses between their errands, when the efficiency lapses, the people in the scene full of life in an animated stillness.

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