As one teacher said, “The mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it.” Love is the bridge. It is the whisper of underlying suchness. To enter this reality, we let go of the thoughts and feelings that filter mercy and forgiveness, the resistance, the fearful doubts that seduce awareness into identification with the unhealed. We let the mind float in the heart.

To cross from the banks of “my pain” to the shores of “the pain” we must cross the river of forgetfulness, constantly remembering our true nature and the healing that ever awaits our clear entrance into the moment. The fare is love and a constant remembering, letting go of our suffering, lightening our load. Like a ship that has to jettison its heavy cargo in order to weather rough waters, we begin to cut the fetters of our attachments with mercy and awareness, to let go of all that hinders our progress.

This wonderful, profound excerpt from Stephen Levine’s “Healing into Life and Death” is more than I can wrap my mind around. I just do not fully understand it. But a central notion, here and in the whole of the book, is letting go of our pain. Now, who would deliberately cling to their pain? Well, look around you and you will see many people doing this very thing; and then, if you are honest you will find you too are clinging to a lot of “stuff” that needs to go. I will admit, “C’est moi.” When I was a counseling intern at a psychiatric hospital, a psychiatrist noted re one of my clients, “She clings to her mental illness like most of us cling to mental health.” He was right, as this woman’s identity had morphed into one of pain or “mental illness” and to suddenly forego that identity would have been to entertain something which, in her estimation, was worse than mental illness.

Now most of us do not have “mental illness” to deal with. If we are lucky, we will have to battle some garden-variety, plain-vanilla neurosis. But, the issue is, how do we let it go? How do we let a maladaptive pattern of behavior and its underlying emotional state be cast aside? Well, I don’t have the definitive answer as those who know me well can readily attest. But I’m working on it! It do think it involves honesty, gut-wrenching honesty, as we “unpack our heart with words” (Shakespeare).

And always remember the observation of W. H. Auden, “We wage the war we are.”