In 1948 Cecily Saunders fell in love. Her amour was a Polish- Jewish refugee, who escaped from the Warsaw ghetto, worked as a waiter and was now dying of cancer. She was nursing him, while training as a social worker. He bequeathed her ₤500 which germinated into the idea of the modern hospice movement. Cecily eventually became a medical doctor, and forged the term “total pain”. She recognised that pain has physical, psychological, social, emotional and spiritual components. Pain enters all our lives, permeates our bodies.

I had a bit of a tough year in 2008, probably the nearest I sat to the fire of total pain. What I did most of the time then, was to sit quietly in the dark “rondavel” shaped chapel of Sediba Mountain Retreat, and reading the book Inviting silence by Gunilla Noris…

“Through the practice of silence we become aware

of our pain. The pain is always there – in our minds and in our bodies.

Silence allows us to see it, face it, release it.

 

We constantly judge ourselves.

Our minds decide

What our experience should be

Or should not be

–               relentlessly labeling things good or bad –

demanding that our lives conform to our labels.

Then, when pain comes into our lives

–               and it does to every life – we do not only suffer it,

but we suffer our suffering as well.

We add the mind’s harsh judgment of pain

To our actual experience of it.

 

By practicing silence, we may discover the ways

In which we intensify our pain by judging it.

Then we have a chance to become less harsh,

more forgiving.

 

The pain created by our minds is stored in our bodies,

Creating rigid patterns of behavior, blocking the flow

of energy  within us, cramping our being.

Our harshness and our fears are embodied in our flesh.

 

In silence, we can feel these tendencies congeal –

And allow them to be as they are. They may then

uncramp and release, for anything that is not resisted

tends of its own accord to unfold and change.

 

By cultivating silence, we can find and release

deeper and deeper levels of pain and so discover

once again what is beneath the pain:

the natural joy that is already inside us,

free to rise and flow into expression.”