Dealing with Pain

Pain

Physical, emotional, mental, spiritual pain. We all feel it. No-one likes it.

We resist, judge, suppress, medicate, avoid it. Anything to get rid of it.

Yet pain is part of our experience in the duality of life, as inevitable as night after day, cold after heat, winter after summer. The flip side of pleasure. An unavoidable part of the package deal of polarity. Welcome to earth!

Perhaps the problem is not pain itself, but how we relate to it.

Healing suggests the absence or removal of pain from our lives. But maybe a more helpful understanding would be healing as the correction of our stuckness in pain. Healing as moving through and beyond pain. The facing, embracing and transmuting of pain.

Maybe what we call pain is really just being stuck in difficult energies.

By stopping and turning towards our pain experiences, giving up the fight against it, we release the handbrake keeping us stuck mid-flow. As massively confronting and uncomfortable as this can be, acceptance of the pain allows it to shift as we move our consciousness through the guts of it.

Resuming the flow of experience allows the old to pass and the new to show up.

Suggestion:

• Gift yourself a few minutes, choose a pain point to focus on, focus your attention upon it.
• Notice the temptation to classify, judge, distance, distract from it. All those practiced ways developed since childhood to avoid the ‘bad’.
• Stay with the ‘bad’ feeling, breathe, and actively choose to stay present to the pain. Be curious about it. Make friends with it. Move your consciousness towards it, around it, through it.
• How does it feel to relate to it in this way rather than from resistance?
• Be open to the pain being over and something else showing up instead. It may not be immediate, but notice any shifts in the sensation over time.

 
From writer C.JoyBell C:

“Pain is a pesky part of being human, I've learned it feels like a stab wound to the heart, something I wish we could all do without, in our lives here. Pain is a sudden hurt that can't be escaped. But then I have also learned that because of pain, I can feel the beauty, tenderness, and freedom of healing. Pain feels like a fast stab wound to the heart. But then healing feels like the wind against your face when you are spreading your wings and flying through the air! We may not have wings growing out of our backs, but healing is the closest thing that will give us that wind against our faces.”