Daily Application June 2, 2010 How Shall This Pass, Too?

“This too shall pass” is one of the most quoted phrases in spiritual recovery — and one of the most misapplied. It is often used as a form of emotional bypass, a way to skip past the present pain by reminding ourselves that it is temporary. But the real application of this principle goes much deeper than consolation. It asks something of us that is far more demanding than simply waiting for the storm to move through.

What It Actually Means

The phrase does not mean “ignore what you are feeling until it changes.” It means: the state you are in right now is not permanent, and therefore it does not have ultimate authority over who you are or what is true about your life. The suffering is real. The difficulty is real. But your identification with it — the sense that this moment is the whole truth, that nothing exists beyond the current pain — that is what needs to pass first.

We are the way we are for a multitude of reasons. A single moment of pain, a single season of difficulty, is the convergence of countless moments, choices, and forces — counteracted by countless principles, graces, and inner resources we are still discovering. No single thread of the pattern tells the whole story. “This too shall pass” is a reminder that you are looking at one thread, not the tapestry.

You Cannot Come from Injury to Get a Solution

Here is the paradox: when we are in the most pain, we feel the most urgency to solve the problem causing it. But the injured mind is not a reliable problem-solving instrument. It is too close to the wound, too invested in the pain, too reactive to think clearly. Trying to solve a problem from the center of the injury that the problem caused tends to produce more injury, not resolution.

The application of “this too shall pass” is first to recognize: I am in an injured state right now. And from an injured state, I cannot generate the clarity, compassion, or creativity that a real solution requires. The first step is to stop — to wind down, to get quiet, to let the most acute part of the feeling move through — before reaching for resolve.

Stop Validating Your Pain by the Absent Crowd

One of the subtler forms this pattern takes is the mental rehearsal of grievances to people who are not in the room. We replay the argument we want to have, build the case we want to make, gather the imaginary support of people who are not present. This is not processing — it is a form of sustained injury, a way of keeping the pain alive by constantly reanimating it in the mind.

The question to ask is: what am I actually holding onto here, beyond the misery I have been carrying? If the honest answer is “mostly the misery,” then the practice is to let it pass — not by pretending it was not real, but by choosing, one more time, not to give it any more of today than it has already taken.