Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Cory Muscara. In today's episode, we're going to talk about the pain and the beauty of life.

More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so I'd like to start this episode with a poem by Nikita Gill, and it's called Reckage.

There is nothing beautiful about the wreckage of a human being.

There is nothing pretty about damage, about pain, about heartache.

What is beautiful is their strength, their resilience, their fortitude as they display an ocean of courage when they pick through the wreckage of their life to build something beautiful brand new against every odd that is stacked against them.

So notice how that lands for where you are at this point in your life or even this point in your day.

I think what I really appreciate about this poem is that it honors these experiences of being human, the difficult ones, the damage, the pain, the heartache, the feeling of being broken.

These are not, they don't feel good. They don't feel beautiful in the moment.

When someone says something like all these aspects of us are beautiful, it's beautiful to live the human experience.

I've been guilty of saying stuff like that in the past as well, but I've said that less lately.

Because when I really tune into those experiences, there's a feeling of, yeah, this isn't beautiful, this is actually really quite painful and there's something tragic in this.

But there is beauty in what is asked of us to meet those moments.

What arises through the cracks, the light that shines through, the strength that surfaces, the resilience that we develop or we pull on, the fortitude,

and the courage that is asked of us to show up for another day in those moments where we don't know what to do, where things do feel like they're falling apart around us, where maybe we feel broken.

But there's this whisper of, we can get through this, you're okay, or we feel an expansion within us that can hold the fullness of who we are.

That is what's beautiful. That is what I would consider even sacred.

And so, the next time you're going through something difficult, and if that includes right now, you don't have to celebrate it, of course.

You don't have to appreciate it because now you're a mindfulness practitioner, but see if you can appreciate what is asked of you in those moments.

And see if you can connect to the beauty that does arise to meet this deep pain.

The worst moments of life often bring out the best qualities in us, and ask us to go into places within ourselves we might not otherwise go, and that is a beautiful thing.

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