THE BEAR AND THE THORN

(c) 1989 Nancy Davis, Ph.D.

Once upon a time in a forest not far away, there lived a very fuzzy bear. Now bears usually go lumbering through the forest on all four legs, but this bear always seemed to be limping, as if something was wrong with her right front paw. Other animals would question why she walked with a limp and the bear would reply, "I don't limp!" or depending on how she felt at the moment, "I don't know why I limp." Sometimes the bear could sense pain deep down inside her paw and she would hold it up and look at it, but she saw nothing unusual. It looked just like her other paws, with scarcely any signs of scars or cuts or problems that would cause her to limp.

Now this bear also had problems getting along with the other bears in the forest. She didn't want to tumble and play with the others, and didn't understand why any bear would want to tumble with another bear. She didn't even enjoy getting honey out of trees. Often the bear felt a deep sadness within her, but she wasn't quite sure why. She seemed unable to feel the feelings that other bears told her they had or to enjoy life as other bears seemed to.

One day as she was walking down a path with nowhere in particular to go, the bear came upon a little cub who had fallen into a clump of prickly bushes and now had a huge and sharp thorn lodged in it's paw. The little cub was whimpering and crying because it was very afraid and did not seem to know what to do to get rid of it's pain. Gently the bear held the little cub and pulled the thorn out of the paw. The cub whimpered and cried for some time after the thorn was removed, and the bear watched and comforted the cub as the bleeding stopped and the wound began to heal.

All at once as the bear looked down at the young cub, from deep within her in the hidden corners of her memory, a picture from the past begin to appear - a picture from a time when she, too, had fallen into a prickly bush and lodged a huge thorn deep within the pad of her right front paw. The memory became clearer as she realized that when she was younger she didn't know how to get anyone to help her. So gradually the skin on her paw grew around the thorn covering up the thorn and also covering up the knowledge that it was even there. But the sharp object lay deep within her paw, surrounded by infection that spread throughout her whole body, leaving only numbness instead of feelings of being a bear.

As she found this memory, the bear understood what she had to do. She soon helped the little cub find its mother and then set off to find other bears in the forest and ask for their help in removing the thorn. Before long, she managed to find a bear who had much experience in thorn removal. "This is going to hurt some," said the wise bear. "It's been buried so long that as we bring it up, you may wonder if you shouldn't leave it in place so you won't have sharp pain now. "But," she went on, "this thorn has hurt you far more than you now understand. It must come out so the infection that it caused in your body can be healed." Then, using the pressure and persuasion, the wise bear eased the sharp thorn nearer and nearer to the surface of the lonely bear's paw until at last it was visible and could be removed. The other bears helped, too, and before long every bit of the thorn was out.

Getting all of the pieces of the thorn out after such a long time was painful, but the bear understood that in order for her pain to be completely gone, every bit of the long embedded thorn had to be released from her paw. As she began to heal, her paw sometimes hurt, but she noticed that each day she felt better and better. It was amazing - she was experiencing feelings in a new way and seeing the world through the eyes of a bear who was healthy and who, at last, loved being a bear. And to make sure she learned from her experience, she told other bears how powerful a mind can be to hide the pain of a thorn buried deep in a paw. For she understood the lesson of the thorn, that pain not remembered can be the most destructive pain of all.

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