There Is Pain When There Is Love

There Is Pain When There Is Love : 

The resistance of the heart that we experience is because of pain. The penalty for love is pain. The penalty for opening your heart is that you can be hurt. The penalty for loving people is that they can turn you down. They can insult you, they can disappoint you, they can betray you.

There is pain when there is love. There is pain in seeing the sickness, in seeing the suffering of others, that you don’t have to experience if you choose not to love.

You won’t have to feel pain if you decide not to have sensitivity for others. So people say, “No! I have loved and I have suffered, and I will not love again.”

It’s like a popular song in America in the 1940s, “I’ll Never Smile Again.” This is the feeling that many people have as they grow older. They become bitter, and they lose the capacity for love, thinking “I may not be happier, but at least I won’t be unhappier.”

Jim Corbett, a famous tiger hunter in India, said that he did his favorite hunting with a camera. He once saw a tiger stalking a baby goat. It was almost ready to pounce when the little goat heard it. The goat turned and, not knowing that the tiger was its natural enemy, it took a step toward the tiger and sniffed at the tiger’s nose in a friendly manner. The tiger, in response, raised itself up and with great dignity walked away. It wasn’t able to attack.

This quality of openness and lack of fear is something we see in the very young, and we see that it is progressively lost as people get clobbered by life. Because, let’s face it, life does clobber us.

There are two possible responses to this. The usual is to say, “All right, I’m not going to let life clobber me again. I’m going to clobber it first!” Before you know it, a hardness settles into the heart. Most people are like that.

The other way that I’ve found is to go on loving. I find that I’m happier loving than not loving. If people choose to hurt or disappoint me, I’m not going to allow that to stop me from loving them.

Life is always shifting from pleasure to pain, from light to darkness. Life is like that. It will never be anything different.

Once you fully accept that, then something difficult comes into your life and you say, “All right, let it be. What can I learn? How can I grow from this experience?’ You refuse to say, “I reject this pain. I can’t stand it. I don’t want it.”

It takes courage and determination to do that. But after a while you find that it really works when you accept the pain, when you choose to keep the heart open, when you choose to love someone even though they betray that love.

You discover with that attitude that suddenly it is no longer painful. Joy comes instead.

This is one of the wonderful things about God’s tests. They always seem so hard, and yet if you open your heart to them, you find that they’re nothing but joy.

This is the way divine tests are. They wouldn’t be tests if they didn’t seem bleak. But if you reconcile your heart and can say, “God, you know best, and I don’t. I accept what You give me.” Suddenly you find that it’s all joy. You can even laugh at it.

Om Namah Shivay.