Learning to Love the Sore Spot
This article was originally shared on “Our Circle” - a community blog for students of Bonni Ross - in 2019
I’ve been enjoying another Trungpa book “Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving Kindness”. I am grateful for his naming of our “sore spot” – an analogy for compassion, our embryonic compassion.
“An open wound…..is always there. That open wound is usually very inconvenient and problematic. We don’t like it. We would like to be tough. We would like to fight, to come out strong, so we don’t have to defend any aspect of ourselves. We would like to attack our enemy on the spot, single-handedly. We would like to lay our trips on everybody completely and properly, so that we have nothing to hide. That way, if somebody decides to hit us back, we are not wounded. And hopefully nobody will hit us on that sore spot, that wound that exists in us”
As I come to grips (or to hold hands) with the ways that I have “fought” for peace and so-called love, I am realising how much of my experience has been about power over or power under. To position myself above or below, to avoid having to feel the painfulness of mine and others humanity. Ouch. I can relate to the passage above. Part of me wishes this sore spot, this open wound, wasn’t there. That I could somehow shield myself from the world and from my own pain. There are so many gross and subtle ways of avoiding the basic pain of being human.
But the more I look, the more I see that this sore spot, this open wound, is a real gift. It is one of the only things that keeps me honest. That tells me when I’m online, and when I’m full of shit. When I’m being truthful, and when I’m side-stepping, however subtly or undetected by another. It’s a compass of congruency, of kindness. It reminds me that I’m human, and so is everybody else. Every time I feel this sore spot and try to pull away from it, there’s more to love. More to open into. More defenses to soften. More to empty out. It is this wound, Trungpa says, where “the germs could get in and begin to impregnate and take possession of us and influence our system…..Thank Earth!”
He says our buddha nature is like a heart that is sliced and bruised by wisdom and compassion. “We begin to realise that our whole being is made out of one complete sore spot altogether……that vulnerability is compassion”
Now I notice myself giving thanks for, and taking refuge in, this sore spot. Many times I don’t know what to do or say. That’s Ok. “Speaking and listening from the heart” continues to reveal deeper meanings. This sore spot comes more and more alive, and even finds joy in its soreness, in its shared humanity. The muscle of the heart is strengthened by this stretching and growing. What a wonderful thing 🙂