What lies on the other side of pain?

A short answer could be – “more life”. More living. Even if it includes death.

On a visit to South Africa in April last year, the 92 year old liberation theologian, Jürgen Moltmann answered one of those awkward questions from the audience: The secret of life, is living it.

If life is “a thing that consists in bursting open, thrusting forward, in constantly going beyond what is…”(see last week’s blog), it also entails moving beyond pain and the embodied experience of suffering. And as narrative therapist and theologian, I’m very curious in the process of “moving beyond”. How do we move beyond the things and people that hurt us? For me, this connects to the question – How do we make meaning of the things that threaten our living of life? My take on this question, is that our bodies, our daily experiences in the specific worlds we live in, the way we use language (as well as the words we don’t say), the place and space we move in, and an openness to that which lies beyond the boundaries of the skin – are involved in the intricate interplay of making meaning. I ended up calling this the embodied sensing of meaning.

But I’m not that original all on my own. Along the way, I discovered Eugene Gendlin’s notion of “life forward direction”, which I carried into my way of doing narrative therapy. Listen how the health psychologist, Les Todres (another influence) describes this concept as “a leaning towards the life that is not yet, and the ‘newness’ of being touched by an aliveness that always included the possibility of pain”. It is a hunger for the freshness that life presents.