Elgin Lee Quan

Finding Joy in the Midst of Pain

By Elgin Quan

         Getty images. 

Vulnerability, a Divine Condition.

In our current age of fear, ambiguity and despair, a facade of grief lingers on the surface of everyone’s faces. If roses thrive on thorns, can joy and grief be two sides of the same coin?
What if authentic joy can be found? What if we believe like Freud says: that in spite of pain “grief is a miraculous gift which is given to help heal that pain.” What if what the Chinese word for “crisis”: Weiji, 危机 whose characters mean on the one hand, “danger”, 危 and on the other hand, “opportunity” 机, holds the mystery to authentic joy?
If everyone grieves, everyone suffers pain, should we not make effort to learn how to receive pain well and be open to learn lessons from its ubiquitous partner, grief?

** The Physical Factor: Breathing**

A clear mind is a like a deep well. Drink deeply to live fully.
Countdown to calm down.
To remove mental fog and emotional toxicity, learn to breathe. Correct breathing involves counting, taking deep coordinated breathes.
It can be as simple as putting into practice the 4-7-8 breathing technique:
• breathe in through the nose for a count of four
• hold the breath for a count of seven
• part the lips and exhale loudly for a count of eight

Steps for 4-7-8 Breathing Exercise:
• Sit with your back straight throughout the exercise.
• Place the tip of your tongue against the ridge of tissue just behind your upper front teeth. Keep it there throughout the entire exercise.
Exhale through your mouth around your tongue; pursing your lips slightly.
• Close your mouth and inhale quietly through your nose to a mental count of four.
• Hold your breath for a count of seven.
• Exhale completely through your mouth, making a whooshing sound to count of eight.

This is one breath. Now inhale again and repeat the cycle three more times for total of four breaths. The tip of your tongue stays in position the whole time. Exhalation takes twice as long as inhalation. The time you spend on each phase is not important; the ratio of 4:7:8 is important.
Purchase a home pulse oximeter. Use it to help check your blood oxygen levels. According to the NHS, the optimum level of oxygen in your blood is between 95%- 100%.

**The Emotional Factor: Feelings

As part of the human race, there are distinguishable stages of feeling that should be managed and processed well.  These emotional stages should not be by passed with trite or easy answers.  Emotions should be allowed to run their course or be directed to find someplace or with someone with whom to share.   
Woven into Hebrew Scriptures,  we find Job moving through In Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ well-known stages of grief and dying:   denial, anger, bargaining, resignation and acceptance.  The first seven days of Job’s time on the “dung heap” of pain are spent in silence:  the immediate response of denial.   They he moves to the second stage,  anger.   “This so- called life I have is not really life.  It is death?  So why should I be happy?”   Job has lost his health, family, possessions.  Devastated by his losses,  some of us may have been there,  we can echo Job’s cry about the day he was born: “May that day be darkness.  May murk and deep shadow claim it for their own.  Make it not a day of light but darkness.”  (Job 3:4-5).