Dear Ramona:

Well, induging in Eastern practice such as yoga, which a Catholic should never do, has its own consequences without God personally zapping you. God allows us to suffer the consequences of our own stupidities.

Now that you are experiencing this chronic pain, regardless of how it happened, you have a wonderful opportunity to join your suffering with Christ's. It is such a privilege to suffer and to give that suffering to Christ and share in His suffering.

We can know that suffering is redemptive because Christ was the example. It was His suffering a horrible torture beyond imagination, and his suffering and death on the Cross, that redeemed mankind. The redemption give us now the opportunity to spend eternity with Him in heaven. What a blessing that suffering was; what a great love it was to suffer for us.

How can we not join our petty sufferings with our Lord's who suffered so much?

We can know that suffering is redemptive because the Church teaching it so:

1521 Union with the passion of Christ. By the grace of this sacrament the sick person receives the strength and the gift of uniting himself more closely to Christ's Passion: in a certain way he is consecrated to bear fruit by configuration to the Savior's redemptive Passion. Suffering, a consequence of original sin, acquires a new meaning; it becomes a participation in the saving work of Jesus.

618 The cross is the unique sacrifice of Christ, the "one mediator between God and men". But because in his incarnate divine person he has in some way united himself to every man, "the possibility of being made partners, in a way known to God, in the paschal mystery" is offered to all men. He calls his disciples to "take up [their] cross and follow [him]", for "Christ also suffered for [us], leaving [us] an example so that [we] should follow in his steps." In fact Jesus desires to associate with his redeeming sacrifice those who were to be its first beneficiaries. This is achieved supremely in the case of his mother, who was associated more intimately than any other person in the mystery of his redemptive suffering.

1502 The man of the Old Testament lives his sickness in the presence of God. It is before God that he laments his illness, and it is of God, Master of life and death, that he implores healing. Illness becomes a way to conversion; God's forgiveness initiates the healing. It is the experience of Israel that illness is mysteriously linked to sin and evil, and that faithfulness to God according to his law restores life: "For I am the Lord, your healer." The prophet intuits that suffering can also have a redemptive meaning for the sins of others. Finally Isaiah announces that God will usher in a time for Zion when he will pardon every offense and heal every illness.

1505 Moved by so much suffering Christ not only allows himself to be touched by the sick, but he makes their miseries his own: "He took our infirmities and bore our diseases." But he did not heal all the sick. His healings were signs of the coming of the Kingdom of God. They announced a more radical healing: the victory over sin and death through his Passover. On the cross Christ took upon himself the whole weight of evil and took away the "sin of the world," of which illness is only a consequence. By his passion and death on the cross Christ has given a new meaning to suffering: it can henceforth configure us to him and unite us with his redemptive Passion.

Also check out the article, Redemptive Suffering, by Father Hardon, a man who knew and lived redemptive suffering. In the last couple weeks before his death from cancer, when pain medication no longer worked, Father Hardon was overheard praying, "Lord, give me more pain." Now there was a man who understood redemptive suffering.

Also check out the book, Making Sense Out of Suffering, by Peter Kreeft.

And, Arise from Darkness: What to Do When Life Doesn't Make Sense, by Father Benedict J. Groeschel

God Bless,
Bro. Ignatius Mary