When the dashboard light turns on, do we keep driving? What if it turns on and we become so afraid we park our car altogether and never drive again? The rational thing to do would be to bring it to an expert to fix it. Much like how our car will inevitably need to see a mechanic from time to time for a tune up, so does our heart needs to revisit grace to heal. The patch work will only get us so far before one more bump in the road completely blows out our engine and we’re caught in a bigger, and usually more expensive, mess. Welcome to pain. It’s our pay-attention-inside-now (p.a.i.n.) system. The easiest pain to ignore are the more subtle forms of it. It’s often until we find ourselves in complete destruction, we realize there were check engine lights along the way we completely ignored. This is our learning.
Making Sense of Pain: It’s Actually an “Unmaking” that Heals
The hardest thing to make sense of is when God puts us through pain. And, that’s every Atheist’s point of argument, which I get. It’s interesting how as I deepen my healing journey and begin to forgive some of the biggest culprits of my pain, I see more and more that just like me, who has now been in seasons of struggle, turmoil and have done everything that I possibly could, I still couldn’t produce the outcome I hoped for, because at the end of the day, God’s plan is bigger than ours. Even the pain we’ve experienced – the love we never received, the protection we yearned for, may we forgive our trespassers that they only were too, doing the best that they could? Could we possibly invite the healing thought in that God’s perfect design includes our pain? That he knew which family, which situation he was placing you into. That he knew that this would be a part of the story that not only sets you out on your unique path, but becomes your testimony; becomes your reservoir to serve from. For when we’ve excavated the deepest pains on our heart, His love fills it. His love is then what we live and serve from.
I think the hardest thing that we are challenged with as humans, especially when people pain us, whoever it might be, is that a part of our pain comes from knowing that they have a choice. And as I walk deeper in this path of faith, I have expanded my “self awareness” to degrees out of the need to not harm others (because when you have been deeply harmed by others from their unconscious and lack of self control often we then seek to become the anti-dote). And, even though I have awareness around plenty of things, maybe much more than I need at times, hurt is inevitable. It can be minimized, don’t get me wrong. But to live with our heart wide open means we have signed up for a life of feeling. A life that deepens the spiral of compassion in our hearts — and what a beautiful thing that is. That we get to feel. We feel because we love and we love because we feel. Yes, at times it can feel like a burden, especially when our hurt arises at a very inconvenient time, but what if that’s God’s timing all along? Maybe he is slowing us down to be with the tenderness now in preparation for later? Maybe this tenderness is protecting us from something we would have ran into later on, or wasted our precious time on.
Not Internalizing or Making an Identity out of Pain
A part of my grief when God came into my life was how much my life could have been “different” if I had God from the beginning. Oh, what a human thought that is. God has always been there. And, it’s as if I related to him that he would save me from my pain, my struggles, my upbringing. Yet, any christian who is humble and truly walking the Christ centred path, knows that God doesn’t save us from our circumstances he gets into them with us. It’s the position of our heart that he seeks not our perfection and ability to avoid lessons and learning by not engaging in life. Expanding our awareness, whether chosen or not chosen (aka life does it to you, and for you) is a hard walk we must embrace in life. We don’t really have control over when our world aka our limited vision is going to shift, and then what consequences that brings; what choices, behaviours and things we must change to relate to this new awareness. And, from someone who has lived a very deeply seeking life, almost wanting a remedy for my pain and my past, a way to “remove” it if you will, I have arrived at that the desire to remove a part of ourselves, which is separation, is actually the way we contribute to our brokenness. That all parts of us, need to come home. We can’t un-experience what we’ve experienced, but what we can do is re-orient our relationship to it and make it our edge. We can heal it so it doesn’t have power over us, over our story — and rather it doesn’t “define” us (aka we have created an identity out of it) rather, it makes us.
As I sit here, in remembrance of all the things I have seen, taken part in, and experienced, although they now feel like a distant ancestor who is no longer living, I can revisit those memories without pain — rather, thankfulness. Because all that lives there is compassion, love and that came through His grace. His grace was the salve that freed me from my past because no matter how much I ran, tried to shift my external identity I could never get away from the pain that lived deep inside my chest and the weight I carried in my body because of that. We are often revealed by truth, but then remade in love. I wish I could tell you this is a one time process, wouldn’t that be so nice to gain awareness then shift right away — but things like acceptance, forgiveness and converting our pain into completion, closure which is the birthing of compassion, takes practice. It takes time. It takes understanding that patterns are cyclical, they run deep and the pattern repeats, until it completes — even in the most subtle of ways. That’s why when we end up in situations where we go “how did we end up here again” we must celebrate. You are on your way to breakthrough. No one isn’t also repeating lessons. Please gracefully let that one in. Often people who are very dense in their mind and heart, will shift at the immediate and very macro manifestation of their pain, but what they then fail to see is that the origin of the wound is going to lead them to the next subtle battle in their heart. This is why the devotion to transformation and dying back to ourselves in pursuit of our true heart, is essential to living spiritually aligned in our lives. Often, we don’t realize how much our external environment and what we choose, when and why we choose it is from these origin wounds. And as we deepen our relationship with them, we no longer need the thing outside of us that we chose from that limited point of awareness. This is why surrendering things and giving them back, is a part of our healing journey.
Seeing Pain as a Temporary Part of your Story - Changing your Relationship to It
Our walk with the Lord is a relationship – we have to have grace that any healthy relationship comes with boundaries, and a deepening of trust over time. Meaning, that usually when we start we have a lot of boundaries – places we don’t let him in and touch and guess what? He loves us and works with us where we are at. As he continually shows up for us, never abandons us nor leaves us, the boundaries of our “needs” and often our self preservation patterns, die back, we let him in deeper and we realize there was so much that we thought we needed that now we don’t. So much that we thought we needed to manage ourselves, that we simply don’t. That we thought love was contained in a tiny box, and yet it is far, vast and wide reaching; and always available — it’s us who is controlling the lever on whether we slow down and actually allow it in.
If you’re in a season of re-experiencing right now, you can’t quite seem to get out of this repeat pattern and lesson, I want you to take a deep breath and remind yourself that its nothing wrong with you. It’s what you need. He knows your heart and he knows what you need to heal it. Which, includes however many journeys around the spiritual drain hole of forgiveness and acceptance of people that have wronged us, and often even ourselves for not knowing better or doing better to “protect” ourselves in those moments — for staying too long, for tolerating abuse, for harming another person — whatever the story that you are beating up the past version of yourself who imply does not have the awareness that you possess now. It would be the same as punishing a child for something they did in the future. May you release the younger less wise version of you from the prison you’re keeping them in?
Although our story matters, it’s not making sense of what happened that helps us heal, often it’s the unmaking of sense that opens us to creative new possibilities. When we heal the pain, we see clearer. We see through the eyes of Him, which is how we begin to understand we are living a life so miraculous we can’t help but praise the beauty of it all. We also develop a capacity to be with pain and aren’t as afraid of it because we’ve already entered the arena and gone to battle with it before. And, when we choose to move through hard things, we are rewarded with peace, confidence and an ability to draw upon past experiences that no longer have energetic pull on us, rather give us a sense of resiliency and ability to endure whatever life throws at us as our next challenge. Yes, sometimes waking up to pain is waking up to poor choices and not making them again. And, living a very “perfect” life — aka a highly controlled, fear-based life afraid of adversity doesn’t keep us safe from pain. We will experience it one way or another — even if you wait until your death bed, so you might as well begin practicing now.
The Story We Tell - Is it One of Pain or Healing?
The quality of our life comes down to the quality of the story we tell — the story we tell about ourselves (which is often what we project outward to others and onto others and the story we tell ourselves about the world around us. Often, we don’t know what story our telling, but it’s evident in our actions, our presence and what plagues our thoughts and our expression. We have all met someone who seems to be stuck on repeat focussing on the negatives around them, and it almost can be draining to be around them because they are pulling us into their pain instead of finding their way out of it. We often avoid these people, right? Instead, what if we chose to invite them out of their pain. We can’t fix or heal people, but we can be the person who sees beyond their struggles and plants a seed of hope for them to live beyond the stories they are currently creating an identity out of. Often at every road block in our life, pain lives there. Where there is pain unfelt and unhealed from our past, fear has taken hold of us. And guess what? We all have these ceilings within us. As we grow, there will be a call to consciously heal our inner template in orientation and harmony with our upward growth. Our capacity lives where our fear lives undiscovered. Fear is courage becoming known. The invitation and call is to move beyond our fear — which will trigger pain — and this is why we must cultivate a relationship to pain so that when we stumble upon the upper limit of our capacity, and our growth becomes restricted, we know how to traverse through the fear and heal whatever story of pain and tenderness lives underneath. This is how we grow with our heart and soul intact by purifying and renewing the stories we have to ourselves, others and life all around us. We devote ourselves to learning, playing and seeing things with curiosity instead of projecting a state of certainty onto things so we can avoid them (by avoiding our pain). Again, this is a beautiful moment to say that just because something “hurts” someone or “hurts” us it’s untrue or wrong. The trigger is the doorway. Often what we do is accumulate a life where we hide from our wounds by casting roles onto people and life to keep us from meeting the pain that lives underneath it all. When those who embody truth and love, who aren’t going to people please and help you dissociate from feeling things, them telling the truth is them loving you, no matter how tender it may be to receive it. The question to call in, which includes asking ourselves, is this person speaking from love and truth? Or is it coming from ego? Ego has a unique signature in that it “can’t be wrong” and it’s someone else’s defensiveness and self preservation system coming online to preserve its own wounding. And, often when we are caught up in these quarrels of ego, being triggered to defend from an ungrounded state, close mindedness, that’s often the invitation that some sort of pain is holding us hostage, and there’s healing we must do. Healing our pain is cyclical and non-linear. We go through different rounds, levels and depths with it. Often we’re on a spiral of a trajectory, both moving upward and downward at the same time. As we deepen the layers of our healing (our acceptance, our forgiveness – the allowing in of God’s grace to move us) we have a counter current of growth that happens because the healing unbinds us from the past, lifting the ceiling on our future.
On some level we all know that we don’t control our destiny. Many circumstances are often outside of our control, but the relationship we have to the story, how we see it, how we analyze it, relate to it and what opportunities we create for redemption, allows us to choose our destiny and take an active role in co-creating one of the greatest adventures we can go on: freeing our hearts from the binds of this world. And like any great story, each chapter will come with a set of challenges, beauty, plot twists, deepening character understanding and ultimately — redemption.
This begs the question then: what story will you tell with your life?
Will it be one dripping in beauty, wonder and love?
Will it tell of a divine romance where you overcame obstacles and things in life that at the time, you had no idea how you could accomplish?
Will it speak wisdom, trial and an achievement of peace and reconciliation?
What about your strength and resiliency? Your soft-heartedness? Your desire to live for others and beyond yourself?
Or will it be one of disappointment after disappointment that ultimate lead you to your grave, unshifted, unchanged without any significance for what life could have truly been if you just leaned in?
You choose.
