Pain Redux

The subject of pain has arisen again, so it would be useful to review the points. All pain, including physical and emotional, is a signal that something is wrong. All we have to do is hear the signal to complete the experience. Once the signal is received, the pain will end*. But if we don’t want the pain, we may learn to resist it or push back. The signal is then not being received and will either continue or be suppressed and stored. We store this pain in our body, in our energetic makeup, and in our conceptual and belief systems. Even in our environment.

This big blob of pain avoidance is what Eckhart Tolle calls the “pain body”. It’s also called the shadow story or Maya, the illusion.

To work with pain, first we have to understand how it arises. There is an experience and there is how we interpret the experience. Both arise from consciousness but it is the second that can cause us grief. If we interpret the experience badly then we will resist it. And add it to our pile.

When we carry this bag of suffering around, it colours our reality. Mind thus wants to validate our experience. We thus seek confirming experiences and tend to respond to other events in a pain-confirming dynamic. In effect, we amplify the pain and make it more real.

As energy attracts similar energy, we also tend to attract people, events, and experiences that further entrench our experience. This is why it can seem difficult to move out of it at first. We are in effect trying to change our reality.

When we learn to simply see the pain and allow the experience, it’s surprising how quickly it ends. Physical pain shifts to a background ache until we address the issue. Emotional pain washes over us in a wave and is gone – although sometimes it reveals something deeper that must in turn be seen through.

As we clear enough, we awaken deeper values of the heart. We step into peace, into happiness, into love, and divine love. We no longer need seek love and happiness but rather seek to give expression to it as it overflows from within.

When we go deep enough, we step into a place where we can experience the suffering of all beings at once and not be overshadowed. The ocean of love and compassion contains it all.

While this is naturally a profound experience, when enough people are having such experiences, our underlying consciousness is enlivened with love so much that it begins to spill over everywhere, washing away the suffering of everyone.

I imagine this is one of the mechanisms of those phase transition shifts, when consciousness takes a big step open. But it has to happen through the vehicles that experienced the suffering. Love in itself simply allows it to be as it is.

I look forward to seeing how this will unfold.
Davidya

* unless there is something deeper to be seen