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A Path for Being With Emotional Pain in Clarity and Compassion
Rebecca Fox Stoddard
August 4, 2025
Crying in despair, an earnest student asked her teacher, Seisho Maylie Scott, “I’ve worked so hard to transform this crippling loneliness. I can neither shake it nor live with it. Can you help me?” Holding the student in a steady gaze and offering her confident smile, Maylie ended the conversation with, “Please don’t ever think anything is out of place.” -Maylie Scott Meets Loneliness, The Hidden Lamp, by Zenshin Florence Caplow
“Please don’t ever think anything is out of place.”
The Buddhist teacher Seisho Maylie Scott spoke these words to a student overwhelmed by loneliness, she was not offering comfort—she was pointing to the heart of the Buddha’s teaching. In a single sentence, she distilled something essential: that even the most painful conditions arise within the Dhamma—within the tapestry of this human birth, not outside it.
When I read Maylie’s words I was carrying my own deep grief. Hearing them, my body remained still, but inwardly I sank to my knees. It was as if the weight I’d been holding was suddenly met, not with answers or advice, but with a recognition so spacious it could hold everything. In that moment, something in me loosened—not because the grief was gone, but because I no longer felt outside the path
This isn’t something we accept easily. Loneliness, in particular, resists our frameworks. It doesn’t feel noble or purifying. It often feels like failure. Like exile. And yet the Buddha never asked us to reject or bypass what arises. He asked us to look. To stay. To know.
Over time, a quiet practice has taken shape around this understanding—a way of staying present with painful emotional states, not to analyze or escape them, but to remain in honest contact. Not as a therapeutic technique, but as Dhamma. As training in right view, right mindfulness, and right effort.
This practice—what I’ve come to use in my own life—is not a method or a system. It’s simply a rhythm of attention that helps me stay close to what’s arising without getting lost in it. It draws directly from the teachings: recognition, wise naming, compassionate presence, and the discernment to know when to remain spacious and when to enter more fully into the felt sense. Nothing added. Just practiced.
This is not a sentimental practice. To say “nothing is out of place” does not mean everything feels good or makes sense. It means that all experience—pleasant, painful, neutral—arises within conditions. It has a cause. It has a flavor. And it can be known.
In the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, the Buddha directs us to know the body in the body, the feeling in the feeling, the mind in the mind. Not to transcend it. Not to dissolve it. To know it. This knowing is neither indulgence nor rejection—it is a middle path that rests on intimacy without clinging. What arises is not the problem. Our resistance, our identification, our attempts to make it go away—that is where the suffering tightens.
Loneliness, like all emotional states, arises within the five aggregates: bodily sensation, feeling tone, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. If we train in watching those aggregates without taking them as self, we begin to see: this, too, is anicca. This, too, will pass. But we do not rush it. We walk beside it, step by step, breath by breath, without turning away.
From a neurological perspective, this echoes what we know about regulation and integration. The ability to stay present with difficult affect, without fusing with it, reflects a stable, responsive nervous system. In polyvagal terms, we are cultivating the capacity to remain in ventral awareness while sympathetic or dorsal energies surge through. The body learns that pain is tolerable. The mind learns that impermanence is trustworthy. And over time, the heart learns that no experience, however hard, is actually out of place.
To say “nothing is out of place” is not to make peace with suffering—it is to see that suffering, too, can be held within the field of wisdom. That when loneliness arises, or grief, or fear, we are not outside the path. We are in the middle of it.
The Buddha did not teach us to feel better. He taught us how to be free. And freedom begins in the moment we stop turning away.
May this reflection, and the quiet practice it gestures toward, serve as a companion for those moments when we forget. When we tighten, when we spiral, when we think something has gone wrong.
May it remind us—gently, steadily—that the path includes all of it.
That nothing, as Seisho Maylie Scott said, is ever out of place.
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Glossary
These terms are offered not as definitions to memorize, but as resting places—small stones along the path of understanding.
Seisho Maylie Scott:
A Soto Zen priest and social justice activist whose teachings embody engaged Buddhism. The phrase “Please don’t ever think anything is out of place” is rooted in her transmission of the Buddha’s wisdom.
INTERFAITH SISTERS: A CHRISTIAN and ZEN PERSPECTIVE
RAIN (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Non-identification):
A mindfulness-based process for meeting emotional pain with clarity and compassion.
– Recognize what’s happening—name the emotion or experience.
– Allow it to be present, without resisting or fixing.
– Investigate with kindness—notice where it lives in the body, what it’s asking for.
– Non-identification means remembering this experience is not who you are.
Originally developed by Michelle McDonald and further popularized by Tara Brach, RAIN offers a practical sequence for staying present with difficulty.
Anicca (Pāli):
Impermanence. The recognition that all conditioned things arise, change, and pass away.
The Five Aggregates (Pañcakkhandha):
The five components of human experience: form, feeling tone, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. These are what we conventionally take as “self,” though each is impermanent and not-self.
Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta:
The Discourse on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, where the Buddha instructs mindfulness of body, feelings, mind, and mental objects.
Right View, Right Mindfulness, Right Effort:
Three limbs of the Noble Eightfold Path. Right View is clear seeing; Right Mindfulness is skillful presence; Right Effort is balanced energy toward wisdom.
Ventral Awareness (Polyvagal Theory):
A regulated nervous system state associated with calm, connection, and presence. Contrasts with fight/flight (sympathetic) or collapse (dorsal) states.
Polyvagal Theory:
A framework by Dr. Stephen Porges describing how the autonomic nervous system responds to safety, threat, and connection.
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MADISON
The sentence “And over time, the heart learns that no experience, however hard, is actually out of place.” Thank you for sharing Momma Aug 4, 2025
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