Staying In Your Own Experience

One of the biggest life lessons I’ve ever learned was in an acting class a few years ago. It has even transformed my whole practice.

That’s what I think is beautiful about life, we can make all these connections based on things that seemingly are not connected at all. In the scheme of things, everything we learn becomes a composite within us, and is coming from the knowledge of a collective experience. So all things create what we are, and all ways of learning can enrich our direct experience.

Just a little background, at the beginning stages of my spiritual awakening, I was hungry for knowledge pertaining to healing and esoterics. But then at later stages, like the one I’m in now, I’m learning about broader concepts, life philosophies that broaden my whole understanding about life through nature, through disciplines. It’s really amazing how much we can pull from various subjects.

Anyway, in this acting class my teacher, who was a gifted empath herself, stopped me mid-scene and said, “Maria, you take care of your partner so much in your scenes. Energetically it comes through. Focus on your own experience, it gives your partner more to respond to,”

That clicked. Well, it took some time for me to really digest it. But I understood she meant that my default was that I wanted my partner to be okay, for my lines not to impact them too hard, but by doing that I was robbing them of their own experience. It wasn’t intentional, I had good intentions for taking care of their feelings, but by focusing on them so much I wasn’t contributing the other half of what was necessary for a scene to work. If I had a strong emotion, I needed to bring it, and if it took my partner back, that was their work. In totality, that was the scene.

Having been trained from a young age to naturally be a caretaker, it was like flipping my whole world upside down. I didn’t know how to have my own experience, my own emotions, if I’m honest. So the work began to take shape as I started to dig deeper and find my own emotions, those ones I pushed down in favor of helping others through their own.

In a scene from a few months ago, I remember having a very strong reaction and you could see how hard it hit my partner. He didn’t know what to do, emotionally. As he struggled, you could see that it transformed the way he related to the scene. He suddenly felt so vulnerable, and then he felt so bad because he saw/felt how his words had impacted me, and then our scene developed contours that weren’t there before.

As this framework settled into my life, I noticed that yes, obviously my job involves focusing on my clients’ experiences and emotions, but that the more I have my own experiences (and contain them, for the session) the more my clients have theirs. If I’m lost in the healing, if I’m not there, then I’m not holding space. Although I’m completely focused on my client, I also need to be a very anchored and strong force that comes with the entirety of my life experience and knowledge.

Back when I started healing, I was still working through a lot of the healer/empath dilemma. I was so sensitive to the suffering of others, and that pulls you into the dangerous rescuer dynamic. I always put my clients first, so much that I couldn’t really have my own life. I gave all of my energy, absorbed all their pain, and had nothing left for myself. I’d drop everything if a client needed me. And you know what, that’s not okay.

I will never bring my own stories into sessions unless it's necessary, as sometimes guides will ask of me to share personal experiences to ground certain lessons, but I think that to be a well-balanced healer requires you to focus on living your own life, discovering your own emotions for the 75% of the other time you’re not healing. My balance before was more like 20-80, 20 for me. I’ve noticed that even in that 75% though, it’s about my own healing. The more I can show up sovereign, empowered, the more my clients can too.

That’s something I’m coming to appreciate more and more about being a healer. It’s a calling for me that runs so deep, but more than that, it’s my ikigai— that sweet spot where you don’t feel like you’re working when you’re working. It comes so naturally to me, and I recognize that by having signed this “pact” so to speak to be of service, it means that I understand that healing myself is a continual process and essential for my work. So all opportunities are growth opportunities, and my whole life is based around healing, but not all allocated for the actual healing work itself. It requires you to have a strong sense of self, but also a well contained ego.

Painful Experiences

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.