Pain, presence and patience.
Pain,whatever that is for you, whether it be within your body, heart or your mind, often comes with an inherent tendency and desire to want to get rid of it. This is human, and is not something to be condemned nor judged in anyway.When I see someone who wants the pain to stop
I see someone who is doing the best they can to meet the pain
in the only way they know how.
Bracing, freezing, shutting down is the way that human beings attempt to create or regain a sense safety.
It is this very drive to make it stop the same part that wants us to be safe.
When someone is in that place, it is almost impossible to penetrate.
All of their energy is going towards the pain and their attempts to make it stop. And sometimes this also looks like avoidance or numbing.
Often times, the only person that can “get through” is someone who already knows this spot intimately and has walked through to the other side.
This penetration as it were is not one that pushes or forces through, but rather the opposite. It’s a compassionate, tender, and patient acceptance that such a person embodies and emanates. Their presence silently signalling to the person in pain that they are welcome exactly as they are.
This kind of presence can feel so foreign to anyone in pain, but it is the thing that they deeply crave. To me, this is the Mother frequency.
I recognise that this requires an incredible amount of vulnerability for someone in pain, with their defences on high alert, but this does not change their soul yearning for it.
A person or presence like this invites communion, not only between two people, but also between all aspects of oneself, and between a person and their pain.
Communion creates safety.
We must learn to listen to our pain.
Yet listening is a skill that our current culture has drowned out of us. Smothering us with incessant sensational messaging and material. It is no wonder our pain has began to cry louder and louder in desperate attempts to gain our full embodied attention.
We used to listen to Mother Earth.
Truly listen with all of our senses but most importantly, with our hearts. With the first organ we develop as a fetus.
And now we hear Her screaming out there in the world, in nature, within our hearts and homes, and within the cells of our bodies.
But let is not forget, the first sound or vibration we feel is our mother’s heartbeat.
It is with this same listening that we tend to pain.
With the same love and connection.
Developing our ability to listen and feel requires time and adequate space and an environment conducive with this level of presence.
The conversation with our pain that evolves over a long period of time. Pain might appear overnight, but we forget that there were more than likely many subtle signals that were missed.
This is the beauty of our pain. I don’t mean this in the bypassing manner. It brings us to a place where we must slow down and listen, and feel, deeply. Pain can be exquisite initiation, and once a human being has journeyed with this, the medicine becomes their ability to pause, listen, rest, feel, and move with truth. To truly move at the pace of the Great Mother.
Never rushing a single step, never overlooking a sensation or inutile hit.
It requires a devotion to practice. It requires responsibility unlike any other.
Our bodies are so sensitive and so wise, they can feel when our intentions aren’t aligned with our actions.
It is for this reason any action we take that is even ever so slightly tinted with a desire to make the pain stop will be felt by the body.
It takes time to become savvy to the infinite ways that this program operates inside of us, especially because our culture is set up to support and further imbed this internal program.
The fear that it won’t stop is often what is at the core of the desire to make it stop.
Can we feel our fear?
Can we stop and breathe with our fear?
Can we express the fear, the rage, the frustration, the grief, the longing inside of us?
For what has been buried is often what comes screaming to the surface in our pain.
And it is ours.
Whether through injury, illness or abuse, it does not change that the pain is ours.
It must be felt.
No matter how long it takes.
Our pain must be felt.
Our pain is ours to hold, and in the process of holding it with reverent, tender hands, our pain shapes us in ways that only time and trust will reveal.