Pain, Blockage, Teaching, Writing..

There is wisdom buried in those hills!  Little jewels that form naturally and then must be discovered, polished and nurtured.

Pain is one of my teachers.  Physical and mental pain continually nudge you in one direction to another. Chronic pain, or pain the occurs continually or in perpetual cycles, a bad back for example that periodically shoots nerve pain into your lower body and tightens muscles up and down the spine, can nudge one to irritability and then anger. Sometimes my anger so overwhelms the psychic-physical, connection I have with people, that it blocks the more virtuous and normative connections of sympathy and understanding. Children, and your  connection with children, continually connect us to the world in intensely sympathetic ways, both horizontally and temporally that we naturally think in terms of generational pain and pleasure.

This insight that pain, suffering, and anger block or cover up the more natural emotional intuitions (how are "instincts" related ), was discovered when realizing that Keiko's resentment conceals or covers up her ability to sympathize with the suffering (psychic in the form of depression and physical in the form of shoulder and back pain) I've chronically experienced for the past 10 years. As I was agonizing in back pain this morning, I wondered if Keiko was paying attention. She doesn't seem to.

Why is writing so much more difficult that teaching. There's no interpersonal feedback that keeps keep the narrative moving to higher and higher planes of awareness and empathy.  So writing a narrative is more like "digging deeper" so that one may move higher and higher relative to that depth.