Vipassana Part 4 - Noble Suffering

I have come to understand that the wounded healer is so cautious, circumspect and careful in selecting his or her own healer not merely out of pride, shame, professional scruples or trained judgment but also because he or she seeks personal healing that respects the previous truth of his or her own suffering. In the words of the Argentine potter and poet Antonio Porchia: “He who has seen everything empty itself is close to knowing what everything is filled with.” A wounded healer’s pain is not only a problem, but a valuable source of empathy and insights. It is the magnet that draws healers towards the fate of healing. The wounded healer brings to his or her healer not merely blind pain, but the kernel of noble suffering.

Noble suffering is human misery that drives towards insight, determination, release. It is the knowledge that suffering is existential. The deep note of noble suffering is what differentiates true healing from superficial patch-ups and fraudulent elixirs. The wounded healer is a person suffering from a deep, human, personal pain, who is able to perceive in his or her own plight the kernels of the universal truth about all pain and all plights, and who is accordingly sensitized to, and activated by, a lifelong calling to heal.

Noble suffering is the pathology beneath existential dismay which meditation dissects clearly into sight. It is the recognition that life is a gift, and pain.
Born with neurons, we will feel pain. Born with hearts, we will cry. The gift of life is conditional: only if we use it can we have it, and to use it means to realize that the pains and sorrows of existence are not merely circumstantial, but are intrinsic to tissue and to mind. Noble suffering is distress that serves as provocation to relinquish ourselves. Soon the trees, birds, schoolchildren and grandparents will be felt as crying out for your healing emanations that convey: “this hurting and inconstant self is not really you.”