#024 - How to reorient to your pain?

This is for you – dearly beloved – who are in the emotional throes of a painful experience that the Universe has thrust upon you.

First of all – you don’t need to avoid the pain.

If you don’t need to avoid the pain - you don’t need to avoid the pain. Sometimes, avoidance is a good coping strategy – but it will not let you alchemise your pain into growth.

So – if you are here – you don’t need to avoid the pain.

Every painful experience is part of our initiation – and if we avoid the pain, we avoid our initiation and our transformation. Believe it or not – you are being initiated. Especially when the Universe sends a painful experience that puts you right in touch with your feelings. This is a gift and a blessing. You are in a state of rawness where your senses are heightened and your connection to the divine is at its strongest.

So – let’s make use of this opportunity.

First of all – notice every little way in which your mind is trying to conflate the state of things. All those stories it’s making up that you don’t know whether they are true or not. And notice how it tries to use those stories as evidence to say something about you. Probably not good things.

These are the forces of the imprintation that every traumatic experience, every time of feeling abandoned or rejected, alone or unloved – have left on your psyche. If you experienced a lot of trauma growing up – these forces will be powerful. The thoughts that appear will be loud and it’s as if their only purpose is to make you feel sad, bad, shameful, guilty, despairing… “Nobody will ever love me”, “I’ll never achieve my dream”, “Things will never get better”, “I am a loser/loner/pathetic” – they can feel so powerful in these moments.

But they are just thoughts.

Even if you have let them run wild countless times before – causing depression and despair – every new day and every new experience is an opportunity to practice changing this pattern. The weight of your past, and how it affects you today, may feel excruciatingly heavy.

And while you are feeling all the feelings that are with you right now – you probably know in your bones that it’s not really at all about the Thing that happened. It goes much deeper than that. It’s like the Thing was just a stimulus, that brings up all this stuff that lies beneath. It’s a hit on an old scar that ends up hurting much more than if it hit a healthy part of your body. Or if it hits a body that is weak – the bruising is much greater than if the body was healthy.

When it comes to things on the emotional sphere – we are talking about your spiritual and energetic body. Trauma and childhood challenges, if unhealed, cause immense weakening in this spiritual body which encompasses the psychic body and the emotional body (I’ll just call it the ‘spiritual body’ for ease from now on).

The pain and the suffering you experience is a valuable indicator of where we are at in our spiritual body. And this realisation can bring up grief – but it is necessary for the process of fully healing. This is possibly why so many people are afraid of their negative feelings and do anything they can to avoid them. For, on some level, they want to avoid the even greater realisation that brings up the need to grieve.

But the only way to truly let go and heal is through grief. There is no way around it. We know this from countless books and experts on dealing with loss and grief.

The reframe I want to offer is this:

You are meant for great things. I believe that all of what we experienced in the past, all the challenges and the suffering – are the key to our gifts and our purpose. To have undergone them are the integral part of our initiation. All the greatness that you will amount to will come from having experienced and healed these challenges that your soul came to this earth to experience.

We don’t do this healing until we are ready.

But I feel that you are ready – you are ready for your true initiation. And this means taking the opportunity to practice re-orienting to your pain. To shift from orienting to it from a place of victimhood and entertaining all the thoughts and beliefs that confirm your powerlessness.

You do have the power to choose what you let external events make you believe about you. You have the power to choose what you do not let them make you believe about you. You have the power to choose what you give yourself in these moments.

Do you give yourself distraction, rumination in self-defeating thoughts, obsessive-compulsive behaviour, dog-paddling, anxiety-reinforcing content or something else of a wounded energetic frequency? Or do you seek that which can nourish your soul, reinforce your empowering beliefs, make space for your feelings, your creativity, your authentic expression? This is a wonderful opportunity to practice your boundaries – within yourself, as well as with others and the external world.

It's also an opportunity to practice giving yourself what you need. Practicing radical self-care. This goes beyond bubble baths and positive affirmations (although both of these can very well be nourishing parts of self care!). It can look like letting yourself have a proper cry. It can look like putting your phone down and not looking at it for the rest of the day. Putting in place the boundaries to let you be without distractions. It can look like going for a run, getting your sweat on. It can look like breathwork, meditation, listening to music that feels right. It can look like journaling, painting, woodwork or any other form of creating.

Anything you need to support you during this time of emotional heavy lifting. You are not just getting over a disappointment or a heartbreak. You are in the process of transforming – HOW you process these experiences.

This is Your Life.

This is Your Power.

This is Your Initiation.

And I know if can feel so lonely at times – like you are crawling around in the dark as it’s happening, not knowing which way is up, which way is down. Your intuition knows. And know, that magic lies on the other side of your healing, of welcoming All Parts of You

 - home.