When we go through pain, it’s important to sit with it instead of bypassing. The (unconscious) human tendency is to push it down, get over it, distract ourselves. It’s human as much as it is inhumane, because instead of what animals naturally do (they dispel energy and literally shake it off) humans tend to want to tuck it away somewhere so it’s not felt or seen.
Sometimes we do this so unconsciously. But this has energetic consequences. It can create blocks in our system that then have other consequences. For instance, if we don’t express, we also tend to block our creative expression too. Writer’s block is often a symptom of blocked emotional expression.
It may feel comforting to let it simmer elsewhere in our bodies instead of feel the tears, the rage, the anguish, the broken heart, but it will surface at another time and in another way. If we move through it now it becomes so much easier on the physical body too, because it hurts our physicality to hold so much unprocessed emotional pain. Aches always have a direct emotional root.
How we can begin to release the pain is to first check in on our bodies through a body scan. What is lighting up for you? Notice it, and ask it what it’s telling you. I sometimes find this much easier to do in the presence of someone who I trust, or with a practitioner who knows how to hold space. Secondly, I find that if we touch the area that’s lighting up, we can assist the process as well. When we hold ourselves, we comfort the body so that it feels safer and more reassured. The body communicates with tactility, so it responds well to it too.
We can often wonder what the reason is. Did we attract this? Why? What is the pain teaching us?
In the initial stages it might be hard and insensitive to try to ascribe a reason to the painful experience. But when you’re ready, it can help a lot to find the larger lesson. Pain is a great teacher, if not the best teacher. We grow in our resilience and strength, and as one healer I worked with today said, “painful experiences happen to people who can handle them. It’s not the experience that defines you, it’s how you emerge from it,”
I remember my first spiritual teachers told me, “the only way out is through,” we do have to deal with the pain in order to find the light. Sometimes it can feel like it’s never ending, but there’s always an end in sight. This reached a new level of applicability when I began acting, and finding that the greatest resource I could possibly have was my pain. It’s in my pain that I can find vulnerability, bravery, and relatability. It’s through my pain I can find compassion.
Sometimes, if the pain was inflicted by someone else, we also need to understand that some people are suffering. Their pain controls them because they haven’t learned to move through it. Hurt people hurt people, is the saying. Unfortunately, we can become casualties to other people’s pain, and for a brief period of time the light in our hearts may dim from it. Our hearts may become guarded for some time, but in the long term, we’ll be able to see the gift that is pain if we allow ourselves to see our pain first. Then it doesn’t control us, and then we don’t repeat the cycle.
Most times, it’s not that we attract pain into our lives. There’s a real danger in accepting the spiritual “truth” that is that everything we attract is something about us. I find it to be at best, an easy default and at worst, insulting. Sure, a lot of times people around us can mirror something about us we need to heal, but not all the time. Even the highest vibrational person is not immune to pain.