Honouring experiences is an invaluable way to communicate with life, they are often our greatest teacher. Only when we acknowledge what's happening to us can we truly benefit from life's teachings.
This is especially important with pain, because our natural tendency is to push it away and move past it as quickly as possible. We tend to want to brush it under the rug, but we all know that often the more we resist something, the longer it persists.
We can pay tribute a painful experience by marking it in some way, bringing ourselves into a more conscious relationship with it. We might mark it by creating a work of art, performing a ritual, or undertaking some other significant act, sometimes all we need to do is light a candle in honour of what we've gone through and what we've learned. No matter how small the gesture, it will be big enough to mark the ways in which our pain has transformed us, and to remind us to recognize and value all that comes our way in this life.
My Thoughts:
I am in two minds about this. Half of me thinks that a lot of painful memories are best left in the past, consigned to a place where they can no longer hurt and kept there never to be referred to again. However, I also see that value can be gained from addressing things head-on.
The key, as far as I see it is to treat each painful experience on the individual merits of the incident. A classic case of one-size definitely does not fit-all.
There are things that have happened in my life that I will never come to terms with and so, once the initial hurt and despair starts to subside I consign them to there own little section of my memory, and even go so far as to attribute them to the me that lived through it, and not the me that is now having survived. I find that by doing this I can then talk about them without it affecting the now-me too much, as I think about it and refer to it as if it happened to someone else.
As to the idea of marking painful events in some way, well I think that could be a slippery slope to never being about to move on if you are not careful. I have known people that are so consumed with a specific event that honouring it has taken over their whole life. Personally, I keep things as simple as possible, I have a memory-stone garden for those that are no longer alive. I write their name and dates in permanent marker on a nice stone that I find on the beach and then add them to the garden, unfortunately as I am adding more years of age, I am finding that I am adding far too many rocks.
It amuses me to wonder if someone will do that when I die and add me to my garden.