We have been so lucky to have the wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh available to us during our lifetimes. And while his death this past year has been a significant loss to our planet, his decades of writing and teaching remain such a profound gift to our growth and potential for cultivating awareness.

I love this particular quote as it reminds us of the importance of coming home to ourselves. I find the use of the phrase “go back and take care of yourself” both powerful and poignant, as it points to the reality of how frequently we leave our own true experience in the hope of both finding answers and diversion outside of who we are. We often become so adept at this that coming home to ourselves is both daunting and unbearably painful. And yet, that is actually the point. Only by willingly seeing and feeling our true experience can we heal and move forward into our wholeness.

“Your suffering needs you to acknowledge it.” Of course, in the Buddhist philosophy, our goal is to detach fully from our oh-so-human experience in favor of equanimity and calm neutrality. What is often NOT said or understood by those of us who hear this though, is that we must first experience, learn from and in fact even befriend that pain. How much easier it would be to simply go from awareness of suffering to lofty objective witnessing of our experiences.

Alas, that is not the true path; that is not how we experience true wholeness. Thank goodness for teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh, Tara Brach, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield and myriad other modern-day Buddhist teachers who have shared the distinct importance and value of first honoring our pain, its roots and sources, and then befriending and supporting ourselves into healing enough to begin to practice a mindful way of life that allows equanimity.

For me the last sentence of this quote is deeply meaningful in terms of how it speaks to the work of healing the inner child/teenager/family. “Go Home and be there for all these things.” Be there for the traumatized body and somatic sensations that arise from our histories. Be there and experience the feelings stored in that body, mind and heart. Be there to explore those perceptions that our experiences have formed and cultivated. Even though we often find many of those perceptions are faulty once we have explored the other elements of our experience.

But as we work with each of these areas of ourselves, as we explore the pain and the roots for all of it, we heal our trauma, we heal our grief, we come home to ourselves. It took me 20 seconds to write that. It takes months and years and layers and repeated homecomings to heal those past hurts and find inner peace. It is then that our spiritual work and meditation can become the peaceful process we imagine it to be.

So often we hear people talk of the spiritual path as if it would (“should if you do it right”) keep you from deep emotional pain. I remember the first time I heard the term “spiritual by-pass.”(In other words, “acting” or claiming a spiritual practice and path that has them so “above all that pain stuff” and therefore seemingly doing it right. And yet, I would notice that that person would behave in ways that belied actual growth or awareness when it came to relationships or engagement in the world. We likely all have met people like that.

While our personal work does not include judging others for theirs, it is comforting to know that the great spiritual teachers of our time encourage, honor and highly recommend the work that brings us to tears and then builds us into warriors. And thank goodness we can do this work with others, both in counseling and in our healing communities. So, the next time you find yourself experiencing yet another layer of grief about something in your history, or reacting in a way that surprises you and looking at the trigger and what the original source was, remember you are doing more than personal growth. You are doing spiritual practice. Pat yourself on the back and give yourself a hug.