Cattāri Brahmavihārā

At a meditation retreat I attended a few years ago, one of the venerables leading the retreat shared an idea that had proven to be incredibly valuable to me: when experiencing pain, you have to be willing to allow it to endure forever if it must. In other words, you need to give up all bargaining and recrimination and just let it be what it is. If you can do so, you will soon find that the pain isn’t a monolith that is uniform and unchanging but that it is a constantly pulsating energy, vibrating and moving according to its own rhythms. Maybe it disappears after a time and maybe it doesn’t but, and this is where words fail, you discover that all of the pains and suffering you have been running from and rationalizing were never quite what you had imagined them to be.