Question: What is the best way to make progress through pain and sickness? I am sick so often.

Sri Chinmoy: The best results you will get when you feel that you are not the one suffering. Feel that Somebody who loves you so much is suffering in and through you. That is the best way for you to make the fastest progress. God loves you so much. He loves you infinitely more than you love yourself, but He wants to have an experience in and through you, which you are calling pain. You are suffering, suffering, suffering. You have to feel that Somebody loves you so much, and He feels that this is the best way for you to make progress.

You are not invoking or inviting the pain, the suffering and all the ailments that you so often get. You are not inviting them and you are not enjoying them. Some people enjoy getting an ailment so that they do not have to go to work. When they have a headache or a stomach upset, they intensify it. If they have a headache, they make it into a migraine headache. By putting force into a silly headache, they can justify to themselves that they do not have to go to work. First they magnify their pain and then they justify why they do not have to do this or that.

In your case, you have to feel that this is a very special experience. You are praying to God for His Fulfilment. You are praying for God’s Victory, the Supreme’s Victory, your Guru’s victory. That you have to continue to do. Even while you are suffering, you have to do this, not only while you are physically all right. You will pray always for God’s Victory, the Supreme’s Victory, my victory. If you can continue with this prayer, then only will you have the true sense that your suffering is for a special purpose. If you are for God’s Victory all the time, then only will you feel that for a special purpose God Himself is having this physical pain in and through you.

When you are suffering, you should not say, “God does not want me to work for Him. That is why He is giving me this pain. God wants somebody else to make the fastest progress. God has given me this pain so that I cannot make progress.” The human mind will think this way, but the heart will say, “God loves my physical body infinitely more than I can ever love my body, but He Himself is having an experience in and through me which I do not understand and I do not have to understand.” Then you can make the fastest progress.