What is your relationship to pain?
Each of us has a relationship to pain, conscious or not.
Whether you see it as your friend or foe, pain has helped you grow, and taught you important lessons. Pain is a familiar experience in life. It's never fun when you're going through the thick of it, but pain can be a valuable ally when you create a more conscious relationship to it.
Being in a body can sometimes be a painful experience. Emotions, including pain, are the language of the body. You can learn compassion from feeling your own wounds, and also from witnessing and validating the feelings of others around you. Growing this consciousness helps you to make better, kinder choices about how you treat other people in your life.
We inflict pain on others when we judge them without bothering to say hello to them first, usually because we are afraid. By not seeing, not understanding, and reaching a cold calculating conclusion about another person without taking the time to put ourselves in their shoes, we create mountains of pain.
You also create your own pain, often unconsciously.
When you believe lies about yourself, lies that tell you that you can't, aren't, and will never be enough, you're going to feel pain, despair, hopelessness, or something equally rough. This can stop you from growing and reaching for your dreams. If you don’t think you’re capable or deserving of having what you want, you might not even try.
If you don't know yourself, you might create a situation where you need others to tell you who you are. You create pain by endlessly comparing yourself to others and by believing the lie that there isn't room for you to be who you are.
When you need others to approve of you, it's going to hurt when they don't. You will be controlled by this. If this has ever been true for you, and no longer is, you learned from it. Don't blame those who 'hurt' you because they were mean or didn't approve of you. They helped you see that it's up to you, not them, to approve of yourself. Once you do, pain gone!
The greatest pain is loneliness: the pain of not being seen.
We hold tightly onto our pain sometimes, as if it defines us. Sometimes it does - have you ever met anyone who defines large chunks of his life by pain? ‘If only that event hadn't occurred I wouldn't hurt all the time!’ There are those who like to believe that life is hard and that's just how it is, and that there is no letting it go.
Pain makes things real for some, and holding onto old uncomfortable energies makes it real that they went through an experience. They will let it go only when they are ready to do so. Some people have pain contests, ‘my pain is bigger than yours!’. Others pride themselves in holding onto every bit of the pain, and you can see it in their faces and bodies.
Our bodies store the pain we take on: spiritual and emotional pain, as well as pain caused by negative thinking, anger, and invalidation. We think all that toxic energy is hanging out in the ether somewhere, or in our minds. Meanwhile, guess where else it's going? Yes, straight into our bodies. Pain cannot be solved. You won't make sense of it.
But you can let it go. Here's a few suggestions that may help.
Say hello to the pain: "hello pain!". Whether it's physical, emotional, spiritual, mental, try to say hello. It exists and you are experiencing it. Notice if it’s even your pain to begin with.
Don't judge the pain. It's here for a reason. Maybe you know the underlying cause of the pain, maybe not. Whichever, just say hello.
Ask the pain why it's here. You may already know why, or not. Use this tool to simply ask. It helps to find a quiet place, sit still, close your eyes and go within, ask and then listen.
In "The Book of Runes", Ralph Blum said "don't suffer over your suffering". Often we create more pain for ourselves because we are already in pain over something that has gone amiss. I've noticed that whenever I've done this, it's because I go into the fear of what will happen now that this pain is here for me to deal with.
What is this pain teaching you? What can you learn from it?
Do your best to let go of the pain. Is there anything else you can let go of that will help you to release this pain?
No matter how good you are, how kind and perfect and sweet, you can never ever make another person let go of pain. You can inspire them to do it, but it's their job. so if you've been failing at this and feeling bad about it, stop. I've seen healers go into pain themselves because they couldn't "fix" the pain of another.
Stop making situations and other people responsible for your wounds. Forgive, and that will help you to release your pain.
We are so used to managing pain, controlling pain, "winning" against pain, and fearing pain, that we forget to create a conscious relationship to pain. And that we can. In fact, in order to heal ourselves, we must. Children learn about pain from watching how the adults around them deal with it. If the adults regularly let go, forgive and move on, the child learns it's safe to do this too.
The child learns about pain as she grows, and if she is taught to let go of what she cannot solve, her relationship to pain will be different that the child who grows up around people who hang onto every last scrap of pain, because it is who they see themselves as being. The healer, who, knowingly or not, takes on the pain of others has a relationship to pain that may include an unconscious demand to solve.
The pain that comes from being disconnected from the earth, and from seeing her beautiful creatures suffer and die: Cecil the lion, elephants poached for their ivory, pigs and cows crammed into factory farms in this country, seabirds dying horrible deaths due to oil spills. All of this pain is created by human beings, and we all have the power to heal it.
The earth and all life on it is a great big beautiful ever changing ball of energy. We are in Earth School, and pain is one of the concepts we study and learn from. Few people willingly embrace pain, but we all have to deal with it.
When you choose to create a conscious relationship to pain, you change your whole way of seeing life, and your part in it. You become part of the healing instead of matching to the pain.
Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain. -Joseph Campbell
