Welcoming What Won’t Leave

A compassionate approach to living with chronic and autoimmune illness

Embracing our illness can sound abstract or even impossible. What does it actually look like to do this, moment by moment, when pain or symptoms refuses to leave? 

You can think of awareness as a kind of doorman. A doorman doesn’t control who shows up, but they do choose how to respond when someone knocks. In our own lives, awareness determines what we allow into our experience — and how we meet it when it arrives.

When living with chronic or autoimmune illness, pain and discomfort often return again and again, no matter how much we wish they wouldn’t. When pain or discomfort keeps knocking, it’s often tempting to ignore it, distract ourselves, or pretend it isn’t there. And when that doesn’t work, we may shout internally for it to go away. This response is deeply human. No one wants to invite suffering in. If you find yourself resisting, exhausted, or afraid of what you might feel, there is nothing wrong with you.

Pain that is ignored rarely leaves. And pain that is fought often grows louder.

There is another option — not an easy one, and not something to force — but an option rooted in kindness. We can practice welcoming pain and discomfort into our awareness, not because we like them or agree with them, but because they are already here. When we meet them with warmth instead of alarm, something begins to soften. We stop being alone with them.

Only after something is welcomed can it be known. Only then might it reveal something about its nature — why it arrived, what it needs, or why it chooses to stay. And sometimes, it stays longer than we would ever choose. In those moments, the practice is not to fix or rush, but to continue offering the same gentle welcome, again and again.

Even the most difficult house guests tend to behave differently when they are met with respect rather than hostility. They may not leave right away. But they often become less disruptive, less frightening, less overwhelming. And in that shift, we suffer less — not because the pain is gone, but because we are no longer facing it alone.

If something difficult is knocking right now — pain, fear, exhaustion — what might it feel like to meet it with just a little more gentleness than usual?