Psalms 31:9 · World English Bible
Psalms 31:9 Meaning Have Mercy on Me
Have mercy on me, Yahweh, for I am in distress. My eye, my soul, and my body waste away with grief.
What does Psalms 31:9 mean?
Dukkha: Suffering The ache that spreads until no part of a person is spared. Eye, soul, and belly are all consumed, and the trouble he cries out of has flooded the whole house of the body.
From the Buddhism reading below.
Psalms 31:9 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Buddhism
BUDDHISM
Buddhism
Dukkha: Suffering
The ache that spreads until no part of a person is spared. Eye, soul, and belly are all consumed, and the trouble he cries out of has flooded the whole house of the body. Grief is a smoke that fills every room once it starts.
Domanassa: Mental grief
The mind's own sorrow, felt as a weight the limbs did not lift. The eye is wasted not from labor but from weeping, the hurt having moved inward where no hand reaches. Tears wear the face the way slow water wears the stone.
Vedanā: Felt sensation
The raw tone of an experience before a word is put to it. He can point to it in the eye, the soul, the belly, this grief with a place and a texture and a burn. You could set a finger on where it lives.
Vedanānupassanā: Watching feeling
The turn that faces the ache plainly instead of fleeing it. Naming where the grief sits, in this eye, this belly, is already the first steady look that mercy can meet. Standing still in the rain to feel exactly where it is cold.
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Buddhism lens
Live Psalms 31:9 today
- When the heaviness is sitting on you, put your attention on where it actually is in your body: the throat, behind the eyes, the pit of the stomach. Stay with that one spot for a slow minute instead of reaching for your phone.
- If someone close to you is hurting, ask them where they feel it rather than what they are going to do about it. The question gives them somewhere to put the thing.
- When a hard feeling rises in the middle of a meeting or a grocery line, give it one plain word in your head, tired, scared, sad, and let it be there while you keep standing in line. You do not have to fix it to get through the next ten minutes.
Where exactly in your body is the thing you have been carrying?
The same truth in other traditions
Stoicism · Marcus Aurelius
He tells himself to strip a thing down and look at what it actually is, plainly, without the story piled on top. The looking is the practice, not the escaping.
Taoism · Tao Te Ching
Soft water wears away stone over time, and nothing can take its place. Grief works the same slow way, which is why it is met with patience rather than force.
Judaism · the lament tradition
Sorrow is brought as a complaint, spoken straight and detailed, not softened into something more presentable. Naming exactly where it hurts is treated as a form of faithfulness.
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