Healing is not about getting rid of pain.
It is not about learning to live with constant pain.
And it is certainly not about avoiding pain.
Healing is about something much more profound.
True healing is about increasing our capacity to be okay with pain.
We can never fully avoid pain in life.
Whether it is physical pain or emotional pain, we are bound to experience it some time.
We cannot avoid it.
Life brings us pain in so many ways.
Not to test us or to be cruel to us.
Life brings us pain so we can learn from it.
So we can grow from it.
And so we can accept it and still move forward.
When we experience true healing what happens is that we create more space for the pain.
We increase our container for pain so the intensity lessens.
And eventually, sometimes with outside help, we learn that we can feel the pain and still be okay.
Still find a way to be happy.
And still be able to enjoy life.
Sometimes, resisting our pain causes us the greatest pain.
Because we deny it is there and we ignore it.
Yet we cannot ignore it forever.
Eventually it will come back around and hit us over the head to strongly that we cannot ignore it any longer.
Pain is a message.
There is something to deal with here.
And when we take the judgement out of pain, we begin to suffer less.
We begin to be okay with what is.
And we start to learn how to hold our pain in a larger context.
We can be in pain and still smile.
We can be in pain and still love.
To the outside world it may not look like we are in pain.
Yet whatever loss or trauma we have experienced is no less real.
We just create a larger space to hold it in.
Like water spreading out in a larger bottle, there is more air above.
More breathing room.
So as we breath through our pain and we see there are still good things in our lives, we relax.
We shift our focus.
The tension releases.
And the results of hard work we have done to acknowledge and deal with our pain pays off.
We have expanded ourselves.
And in this expanded self is the expanded capacity to hold our pain without suffering.
Is there some pain in your life where you can create just a little more room for it?
~ Sam Liebowitz, The Conscious Consultant