Friday, March 3, 2017

Healing Emotional Pain

The willingness to feel anything; the deepest pain or the most profound joy; is the greatest gift that you could ever give to yourself.

It is the absence of judgment and the end of all analysis. Simply being without projecting judgment on the nature of your experience, without personalizing, analyzing, or mentally repeating past experiences. No longer wrestling with the aspects of reality that the mind interprets as unacceptable. All is accepted because acceptance is who you are.

Pain without apparent cause teaches that context is not as important as it seems. What  good does knowing the causative factor do if the pain is still there? Can you love the demon without knowing what birthed it? Can you fully embrace it in it’s ugliness and apparent evil? That is the real question.

The mind seeks to understand in order to gain a sense of knowing and control. You know that everything is ultimately unknowable, it is a sacred mystery which can never be fully understood. You may observe the cause and effect of surface level phenomena, yet the ultimate causation of experiential phenomena, the underlying essence, can never be known or understood. The mind, however, fights this truth. It resists it and wrestles with it. It wants to know why, why is everything happening the way it’s happening, why do I feel the way that I feel? Why do problems constantly seem to arise, things seem to fall apart, just when something seems perfect it becomes flawed, just when you feel at peace a subtle agitation occurs. The perfect romance becomes a living nightmare, your ideal job situation turns into a suffocating prison, your young, youthful body becomes old, weak and brittle. Why? Because of your mind.

Nothing is as it seems. All which you experience is a mental projection, and all that you perceive is a mental interpretation. Without a judging mind, reality is no longer flawed. It is perfect. The painful emotion is loved and embraced instead of resisted. The spots or wrinkles on your face are seen as they are instead of viewed as a nuisance. Your car breaking down is just another experience instead of an untimely tragedy. When there is no judgment, there is no mental layer to your experience. There is nothing tainting it, blocking it, or weighing you down. There is simply experience as it arises. Nothing more and nothing less.

Most people have a subtle judge chatting away in the periphery of their experience. It categorizes things into a value system. Some things it looks down upon, others it looks up to, and others still it feels indifferent towards. Some things are seen as aggravating problems, some as hopeful solutions, and others as neutral projections of a thought based self. There are some things seen to cause pain and others to bring pleasure.

When judgment ceases, so does trying. If you can’t seem to lay down one then lay down the other. There is no more trying to be something you are not, trying to maintain a certain self-image, trying to feel differently than the way you feel. There is no trying to be present, trying to stop thought and find stillness, or trying to become enlightened. You simply are as you are in the here and now. And that is neither good nor bad. It just is.
When judgment and trying cease you make space for the arising of presence and unconditional love.

Pain shows you the blocks you still have which prevent you from opening fully to life. Pain is the result of the unwillingness to be fully present, to be fully alive. When you are in pain, a part of you doesn’t actually want to be here, doesn’t want to experience life. It views life as dangerous or bad, as something to be fought against. But the problem is that you are Life, so you are fighting against yourself. All wounds are self-inflicted, all pain is self-imposed.

The identification with a value system creates a disparity between the “self” and the “other”. Why is pleasure more valuable than pain? Why is an attractive man or woman more valuable than an unattractive one? Why is money more valuable than pine needles? Why am I more valuable than my fellow man? Or vice versa?

The mind’s value system is based in polarity and therefore implies an identification with polarity. All experiential manifestations are degrees on an energetic scale. Good and evil are simply opposite ends on the same spectrum. A palace made of gold and a hut made of shit are the same energy, just manifested differently. It is the mind that assigns value, believes in this system, and then creates problems and suffering as a result.

All experiential reality is an energetic continuum moving in a cyclical fashion. Something of high value now will inevitably dissolve into low value later, something that is evil may eventually become good, and your deepest pain will often transmute itself into your most profound joy. Nothing is ever as it seems, yet the mind does not know or understand this. It takes every surface appearance as reality, as absolute truth. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Reality is nothing but a fluctuating field of energetic vibrations, willing to shift into its apparent “opposite” at a moment’s notice. And this is what causes pain for the mind. It’s value system is challenged, polarity is threatened, and it loses its sense of understanding and control. Suffering is the result, and this suffering seems like a tremendous curse. Yet it is the greatest gift one could ever be given, because it allows for the dissolution of mind and ego and the opening into the Truth of reality itself.

The mind believes that it wants “things” but in reality we really just want the feeling of freedom from suffering. The mind believes that the attainment of things or experiences will liberate you when this could not be further from the truth. No experience or tangible thing can liberate you, only doing the inner work can. And this involves total and absolute surrender into the depths of your own shadow.

The seeking is an escape mechanism from your own pain, but we all reach a point at which the seeking no longer provides relief. This is the point at which you either lose yourself in despair or you completely let go and allow the pain to dissolve the illusion of self. This is the beginning of freedom, if you so choose.

It is easy to divert blame for your problems and pain to something external, such as collective society at large. But it cannot be the collective that is holding you back because the collective is merely comprised of a multitude of individuals. So what is it that is holding back the individuals of the collective? Dissonant vibrations composed of negative core thoughts, beliefs, and traumatic impressions that have been repressed and buried in the subconscious mind.

If you liken the subconscious mind to a garden, you could say that these are the weeds. So how do you uproot them? Simple. You gotta go in there, get your hands dirty, and pull that shit out. Only then can you deliberately and consciously plant your desired reality into the purified and fertile soil of your subconscious mind.

You can think of the conscious aspect of the mind as that which perceives and interprets reality and the subconscious as that which projects and creates it. Just as you can be conscious of your heartbeat yet cannot really control it consciously, you can be conscious of aspects of your experience that you cannot consciously control, because they have already been created through the subconscious. This is a highly useful and beneficial process, as skills that we learn are delegated to the subconscious mind in order to minimize energy expenditure and increase efficacy. Yet this becomes a problem when we consciously have negative and traumatic experiences and then come to negative conclusions about life because of them. This reshapes the subconscious according to the negative imprint and changes it’s filter and the way in which your experience of reality is generated.

You then begin to perceive and experience life according to this negative imprint that has been delegated to the subconscious, and you are not even aware that this is happening, because the very term “sub”-conscious implies that its functioning is below the level of your conscious awareness. But the one indicator we have which directly shows us the nature of the subconscious mind is our emotions. It is the feeling nature of our day to day life, and most especially the emotional triggers which arise in a way that is disproportional to outer circumstances. When you get “triggered” so to speak, it is a clear indicator that a core negative imprint has been activated. As your reality is filtered through this core feeling or belief, you experience pain as a result. This pain is calling you back to integrate that which is in the subconscious, to bring your conscious awareness into it, and transmute it into presence. So the key is to view these triggers in a positive regard as gifts that allow the full blossoming of your conscious awareness through the integration and transmutation of the subconscious mind.

The degree to which these beliefs and energetic imprints are lodged in the subconscious can vary greatly and can be incredibly deep in some cases. It all depends on the nature of your past experiences, most especially during childhood. Childhood traumas reshape the subconscious and create a negative filter that causes the original experience to be repeated over and over again in the present moment. But no matter how deep these imprints may go, there is always a way to overcome them, and moreover to use them as a benefit to become more fully here, more fully alive, and more fully yourself.

In order to do this, you must release both resistance and attachment to these aspects of the subconscious which you have taken on as part of your “self”. You have unconsciously identified with them, and so don’t truly want to let them go, because it threatens your sense of self and doing so can cause you to literally feel as though you are going to die. So the first step is in bringing awareness into the subtle attachment to your emotional pain. As you do this, it is very likely that you may feel some resistance arising and the desire to distract yourself. This is totally natural, as no one wants to feel pain. But simply bring your awareness into the resistance and watch is as closely as you can. Allow yourself to feel the pain fully, as if you have no other choice, as if you are surrendering into death itself. It is a metaphorical death you are experiencing so that you can be born again into a renewed and fully enlivened self.

Absolute surrender is absolutely necessary at this point. It is your unwillingness to surrender which causes you to cling to the past and hold onto these negative imprints. It is your need for control which continuously reactives the negative patterns in the subconscious and prevents integration into a whole and fully conscious self. When you surrender the need for control, the subconscious surrenders its imprints and patterning as it receives the message that you no longer need it to control reality for you. What may have very well served you in the past is no longer necessary in the present. When you do this, the energetic imprints in the subconscious mind are relinquished and subsequently dissolved into the vast spaciousness of your conscious presence.

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