Pedigrees of Suffering

When I was a midwife working for the Kaiser hospitals here in L.A. it was amazing to me to see that some women seemed to know what to do with the pain of delivering a baby, while others were completely incapable of dealing with it at all.

I always wondered why.  I could think of many reasons, but this morning talking to another patient of mine, this time a man who suffers for apparently no reason, it came to me to think of another why.  Why some people hang on suffering as if that is the only thing they know.

In this particular case, this person due to an unhappy childhood and many traumatic events in his life, thinks that he is privileged in this area of life and his expression was: "I have a 'better pedigree of suffering' and therefore I am entitled to have a fit every time I want, I am entitled to have my wife constantly paying attention to me at her expense,  I am entitled to bring the feelings down every time I walk in a room, etc. etc."

Then it dawned on me.  This guy's privilege is very expensive to him.  He can't have a normal life because he hangs on to his sufferings with his status of privileged by suffering.

I told him that to me, to have those privileges was the equivalent of being sort of cripple in the emotional life and that I myself wanted to eliminate from my life anything that makes me privileged if the price was not to have the responsibility over my own happiness.

Then I remembered the laboring women giving birth and yes, those that thought of themselves as 'privileged' in any form were incapable of coping with pain, while those that thought of themselves as anybody else, with the same situation, would do fine. They could relax and deliver much easier.

So, this finding is extraordinary for me.  As if by being privileged we give up our capacity to be normal and to carry out a full load of responsibilities and therefore, of blessings.

On the other hand, I am sure that most people think of themselves as entitled to some privileges here and there.  What is amazing to me is how we hang on to those privileges not knowing that it is through the very same prerogatives that we loose our freedom and happiness.  Because if we consider that in this life there is so much to learn and to benefit from, we paralyze our own progress on account of some miserable little privilege, like for example screaming or yelling or putting down those that live with us just because we were mistreated yesterday by someone else.

That is amazing. And when that patient insisted to me that his pedigree of suffering was better than mine, I couldn't believe how engaged I was in this business of adjudicating myself some privileges of malfunction because of my own mental frame about how handicapped one is from suffering.

And then there is the story about the 4 different types of hearts, being the heart made of earth that anything you do to it leaves a permanent mark, then the heart of water where the marks only stay for a second, then the heart of air where the marks do not leave any imprint at all and finally the heart of fire where even the attempt to hurt is stopped before it occurs.  So, these particular pedigrees occur in the part of our heart that is earth, meaning the stuff from this world, meaning the lower forces, meaning we are then completely at their mercy, meaning our happiness could never be human because we live the life of the servant forces.

Then, since we have to partake of that nature while we live in this world, it would seem impossible to give up our pedigrees of suffering, but I think that since those 4 elements of earth, water, air, and fire could be mixed and actually the whole world comes out of their mix, we at least have the option to put the accent in those areas where at least we are in control of our privileges, in order to eliminate them and finally feel that if we want happiness we have to work for it, just like anybody else.

I, for one, saw a lot about myself with this patient and for sure I do not want to have any privilege that keeps me malfunctioning or disfunctioning.  Isn't it funny?