Repurposing Hurt for Good

I would like to offer you a form of prayer you can use to practice letting go and practice what seems like losing, but it's actually finding. The "welcoming prayer" encourages you to defy in your life, now or in the past, a hurt or an offense from someone who has done you wrong or let you down. Feel the pain of the offense, the way you first felt it or feeling it in this moment and feel the hurt in your body.  (Why is this important? Because, if you move it to your mind, you will go back to the dualistic thinking and judgments; good guy/bad guy, win/lose, either/or.) Feel the pain, grief, and anger, but do not create the usual win/lose scenario. Identify yourself with the suffering side of life: how much it hurts to hurt. How abandoned you felt if you were abandoned. Hold this in your heart space, your body space instead of process of setting mentally or creating a storyline. Once you can move that place and know how much it hurts to hurt, it will not be possible for you want to that experience for anybody else. It might take a few minutes. Welcome the experience it and it can move you to the Great Compassion. Don't fight it! Don't split and blame! Welcome the grief and anger in all its heaviness. Now it will become a great teacher. If you can do this, you will see that welcoming the pain and letting go of all your oppositional energy against suffering will actually free you from it! It is like reversing your engines. Who would've thought this? It is your resistance to things as they are that causes most of your unhappiness—at least I know it is for me.

—Richard Rohr