You cannot have one without the other.

Pain prods to presence. Being here. Feeling. Aliveness.

It disrupts habitual thinking — opening up pathways for new awareness to enter.

Oh, how we avoid pain! And so avoid presence — choosing lives of comfort, distraction, fueled by insatiable needs to add more and more, grow taller and taller.

“If only I had this, then I can relax,” so many of us think. So pervasive is this thinking, entire systems, societies, and governments have formed to satiate it.

We become prisoners. Free yet bound.

Life is suffering. This is the first so called Noble Truth. Everything this world has to offer — everything — is subject to impermanence. Whatever comes, stays for awhile, and then goes.

And so the mad dash of the mind & ego to fix the dilemma through add-ing, the root of addiction, and the ADD diagnosis (in most cases).

If we would only feel our pain, it would guide us to the truth. It would guide us all the way Home. You already know what that means. Complete emancipation from the unreal, and total fixation in the Real.

Pain awakens presence.

***

As always: take what is useful for your current set of circumstances and human journey, and leave the rest behind.