Tag: Karen Maezen Miller

"... I wrote about the suffering of my own childhood and my years of feeling isolated and unhappy. When he read it, my friend Bob Thurman said, 'You should never be ashamed of the suffering you've been through.' His comment really surprised me. In that moment, I realized how much subtle shame I had been carrying without realizing it. "Bob was passing along a message he'd received years earlier, after he'd lost his left eye in an accident.  His teacher at the time, a Mongolian monk named Geshe Wangyal, had told him, 'Never be ashamed of what happened to you. You have lost one eye but gained a thousand eyes of wisdom.' "I do think it's too simplistic to say that such awful experiences should be considered gifts. But acknowledging that a gift can emerge from pain does not mock the pain