Pain

The first half of 2017 has been determined to squeeze the very last bits of toothpaste out of the tube. For those who have spent years doing their emotional cleansing, polishing their chakras, elevating their soul, irrigating their colon, and raising their vibration the idea that there was even a tube remaining let alone anything in it has come as a quite a shock.

But there has been plenty of squeezing!

I have long held the idea that anything identified by the mind as a problem is not really the problem, merely a symptom. One of the mind's principal tasks is actually to keep you from the source of your problems providing credible decoys which allow you to feel something but not the real depth or source of an issue. Using my mind as the tool of inquiry over the past few weeks have been like asking a politician to tell the truth and so the past month has been handed over to a more visceral form of inquiry reliant on breath work and (gulp) feeling. 

The difference has been like moving from corporate hospitality at a rugby match right into the scrum. From the safety of the stands it is easy to see what is going wrong on the pitch and to have a million opinions on what needs to be done and so much of the advice we receive in life comes from this view point. However, faced with the reality of actually being in the game things change. A different appreciation, compassion and understanding allow for a more intimate experience and proximity to the source of an issue.

Our patterns are unique to each of us and can only be felt by us, and although they are designed to mask the same basic unresolved childhood emotions they present in as many different ways as there are people. To uncover them with the mind may at times be possible but the only way to resolve those emotions is to get down and dirty with them and feel them. You have to be in the game to have an affect.  

This process for me over the past weeks has been remarkable if at times painful. Often times something releases through an emotion and there is absolutely no story or idea attached to it, just a feeling of release. 

However the past week has taken me into a new arena. The arena of physical pain.

Now I should apologise as a man writing about pain as I know we men don't do it very well, but it is my experience so I will share it. I have been blessed to have had a great relationship with my body throughout my life, with only minor injuries and only very occasional pain. So when last week I had a severe (8 out of 10 on the man scale, so about a 3 to most women) shoulder pain which left me unable to sleep and pretty much inactive I faced a new challenge.

My emotional work had been to sit with any felt emotion in an unconditional space, not resisting it, not hiding from it, just being with it. Now physical pain is, on the whole, simply an expression of an unresolved emotional charge which has been so suppressed that it has worked its way into the structure of the body as its only means of getting attention. This may require an accident or trauma but its roots are in the emotional body.

Every instinct with physical pain is to run away from it, mask it, medicate it, distract from it, numb it. In fact anything but to experience it. My work this week has been to sit with it, experience and allow it unconditionally. This cant be done from a place of hoping it will fade as this is conditional. For me this has been a truly humbling experience and it has been amazing to watch the pain move, ease, amplify and generally express. At times I have failed and pulled on my reservoir of tricks to ease the pain but in the times I have managed to stay honest and true with it I have journeyed to depths of feeling which have surprised me.

Through these months of squeezing I can sense a new level of optimism emerging and I am less identified with the drama around me, either personal or collective and something seems to be brightening at a really core level. As the emotional and physical are allowed to express without resistance the mind is set free to create and the world feels a nicer place from that perspective.    

with love,

Bill

p.s It still hurts!