Psalms 38:6 Meaning I Am in Pain and Bowed Down

To be bowed down and to mourn all the day long is to live inside a field of pain that no longer lets go. The old emotion has become almost continuous, coloring every thought until you can no longer tell it apart from yourself. This is the pain-body, feeding on your attention.

It continues all day because you resist this moment, wishing it were other than it is. Turn toward the heaviness instead. Feel it directly, without the story of why. When you stop fighting what is here and let it be, the emotion no longer has your resistance to feed on, and it begins to soften.

Dukkha-vedanā: Painful feeling Painful feeling is one of the three tones any experience carries. Bowed down greatly is the whole weight of it, a back that will not straighten, loins burning, an ache that arrives before any thought about it arrives. Held as feeling, the pain stays exactly as sharp, yet the hardening around it eases, the way a heavy bag set on the ground is still heavy though no longer carried in the arms.

Salla: The dart Salla is a dart in the flesh. One dart is the sickness in the bones, the fever and the sores; the second is thrown by the sufferer, and that one is what stretches mourning across the whole day. Draw out the second and the first still hurts, though the hours stop belonging to it, and there is room again for bread, for sleep, for the friends who stand off at a distance.

Soka: Sorrow Sorrow is grief that burns inward and keeps burning. Going about mourning all day long is sorrow that has become a gait: it walks to the well, sits down at meals, follows from room to room, and wears the same face at evening as at dawn. Seen plainly as sorrow, it comes and goes like weather over a field, and even the longest grey day breaks somewhere.

Kamma-vipāka: The fruit of deeds Deeds ripen, and the ripening lands in the body of the one who acted. Bowing down under one's own foolishness is reading the flesh as a harvest, wounds grown from seed put into the ground by one's own hand. Being the sower is heavy news and good news at once: the standing crop still has to be gathered, while the next sowing is wide open, and that is where a bent back can do some work.

Adhivāsana-khanti: Patient bearing Patient bearing is the capacity to receive sharp bodily feeling without striking back at it. "I go" is already this: bent, aching, still walking, still keeping the day, still speaking to God from the middle of it. Endurance of this kind stays soft, the way one carries a sick child through the night, tired and tender at once, and it is what keeps a long illness from curdling into bitterness.