There are very few of us who enjoy pain. Most of us, in fact, do our best to avoid it. This is not necessarily a bad thing. We touch a surface and pain sensors in our skin send a message racing to our brain saying, “HOT! Move your hand.” We do not want to hurt.
Unfortunately, we make the mistake of thinking there is a one size fits all way of dealing with pain. We do our best to avoid it. While the approach I am going to talk about can also apply to physical pain, I am thinking more of deep emotional or mental pain. We feel pain down in our spirits and souls and we then make the mistake of treating it like a hand touching a hot surface. We do our best to get away from it and avoid it.
We do this in a wide variety of ways. We stay super busy. We make sure we are surrounded by distractions such as electronic devices playing music, podcasts, videos, etc. so we never have calm and quiet. We do not want times of quiet because negative events from our past, dissatisfactions with our present, and vaporous fears about our future invade our consciousness. We become filled with feelings of fear, depression, anger, unease, hopelessness. In short, we hurt. We try to avoid running into these painful feelings or stuff them far away from our thoughts.
What if we were to take the approach of stopping, turning, and embracing the pain? What if we could condition ourselves to become the observer of the anger/fear/depression/pain in our lives rather than the angry/fearful/depressed/hurting person? We spend so much time trying to avoid these negative emotions or beating ourselves up as failures because we cannot seem to break their power that we end up giving them more and more control of our lives.
All of these things are seeds residing in the basement of our being. They will never go away entirely. They are neither good nor bad in themselves. How we deal with them, or, fail to deal with them, is what gives them positive or negative power in our lives.
The next time one of these seeds moves from the recesses of our soul’s basement into the center of the living room of our being, take a few deep, calming breaths and embrace it. I know, it sounds crazy. The thought of doing this can be terrifying. But if you can step back and treat this powerful and painful energy with gentleness and respect, you can begin to learn from it and heal. In your mind ask the fear/anger/depression/whatever, “Why are you here? What has caused you explode out of the basement into the middle of my living room?”
I know. This sounds stupid. We think the answer is so obvious. Some event just happened and it shouldn’t have. However, something I am learning more and more every time I use the above approach is that the immediate event is simply a trigger for something much deeper. As I become the observer who is dealing with a very scared and hurting child, these “negative” things are sharing stuff with me that I need to see to experience healing. I am not going to blow smoke up your butt. It can be a scary and painful process. But the more I am embracing the pain, the more its power is being transformed from something that is hurting to a power that is healing.
You cannot avoid all pain. Pain and suffering are inescapable realities of life. But I desperately do not want you to hurt unnecessarily. There are, however, skillful ways of dealing with pain that can vastly reduce it. Spending our lives trying to avoid, hide from, or deny our pain only assures us of increasing pain. Please, give embracing your pain a try.
Think about it.
You are loved. peace
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