Emotions
arise from our experiences. It is a very
large part of our human nature here incarnate on planet Earth. Certain experiences of emotion such as
anxiety, fear or pain in a present moment scenario can sometimes seem to strum
the chords of prior episodes of anxiety, fear or pain. This may cause many
other similar past experiences to rise to the surface of your consciousness,
making one simple episode seem like a bonfire. It's like discovering you
whacked your knee on something and a bruise followed but you didn't realize you
had it or had completely forgotten about it. Then you either hit it again
or otherwise touch it and the pain returns to be felt yet again.
This idea
makes me wonder if emotional pain ever really heals. We suffer emotion
like anxiety, fear or pain for a multitude of reasons.
As we go
through our lives and experience various events, we assign anxious, fearful or
painful thoughts. At some level, it is almost as if these things are
written into the archives of your psyche. As you move away from those
moments where you have experienced such events, you start to forget about the
negative aspects of your experiences. But then, suddenly, something
similar comes up and the unconscious mind reaches through all of its archived
records to find similar experiences from which to judge or assess the current
experience. In so doing, the thoughts will strum the chords of other
painful experiences and seemingly set them loose, leaving you feeling
emotionally raw and out of proportion with the current experience.
I cannot
help but wonder does emotional pain ever really heal? Our emotions stem from a
number of things. Let’s take a simple
one for example. Anxieties stem from
fear, and this fear stems from the thought of pain. This is not the first
time I've considered this line of thinking. A superficial wound will
eventually heal in time but the memories of it won't necessarily leave
us. I wonder, when thinking of these emotional wounds - the anxiety, fear
and pain, if we will not heal until we begin to better understand our
thoughts. It seems that until you fully understand the extent of a
situation that leads to thoughts of anxiety, fear and pain, you won't heal them
but rather nullify their existence.
I have
another idea on forgiveness that may change the way you look at the
concept. Take the simple knowledge
gained from not taking things personally as an example from our first chapters
on Human Behavior, etc. We've begun to truly learn and understand that
most people who express themselves in mean and insulting ways are not really
telling you anything about you, but rather are telling you about what is going
on inside of them. When you think about it, we once felt the pain of
these seeming attacks, and those wounds gathered and collected throughout our
whole lives.
With some
effort finally, we come to understand that some people are mean just because of
their own conditioning or other forms of biological or environmental psychology,
and this has nothing to do with us at all. The pain that was written, inscribed
deeply within our psyches, becomes unwritten through understanding. Let me say that again in another way. The pain that we feel as the result of the
perceived unsavory or insulting actions of another dissipates with
understanding.
We
transform our suffering through understanding its purpose. Oh, I know, it
is a huge leap to understand that some emotional challenges have a
purpose. This is especially true when certain experiences seem by their
very design to serve no purpose other than our emotional destruction. But
wait, if you go on with that thought, you spill your power out in blame and
fear, and there is no healing or resolution to be had with these kinds of
reactions. There is only the continuous collection of more anxiety, fear
and pain or other toxic emotions you don’t really want to carry.
Through
seeking greater understanding, you begin to truly know that life is not
designed to emotionally destroy you. Essentially, you need to step back and see
a much broader framework from a greater and higher perspective of love,
compassion and understanding. When you can accomplish this, ultimately, the
pain is transformed and simply disappears. There is nothing then to heal
because you have begun to fully realize the illusion of suffering. I'm not
saying anxiety, fear and pain are not real when your thoughts are embroiled in
the entertaining of these things. I'm saying that if you can shift your
perspective for long enough, stand in your own power and take responsibility
for your play, your actors, your sets, your behaviors and your action through
striving for greater understanding, you nullify the effects of pain you think
is caused by others, it seems.
I'm toying
with these ideas not to blame the victims or rub salt in anyone's wounds.
I'm writing from my own experiences of having those chords of pain strummed so
that they rise to the surface to the point I am raw, in an active state of pain
and striving to understand it. I do not fear pain. I see all three
of these topics as very closely aligned. No matter which aspect we embrace,
each time one of these things crop up we are being given an opportunity to
better understand. If I step back from the shadows of victim-hood and
blame, and stand squarely in the light owning my emotions, my thoughts and the
illusions of my own perceptions, I'm free.
These are
tough thoughts to translate beautiful dreamers and I so hope in some way I'm
getting through. I may have to take another shot or two at articulating
these thoughts to help them crystallize more concretely from the pureness of
feeling within to the simple language we typically use to converse. So
much meaning is lost when you have a feeling and yet try to define it with
limited words. You'll understand when you get there, this much I
know. But, I have this thought that if I can articulate what is rising,
it may serve as a light for someone else who wandered ever long in the darkness
as I did. As I'm writing I'm thinking, questioning and
testing.
I'm on an
amazing and wonderful journey of understanding in this life and am delighted by
each discovery whether it hurts, perplexes or confounds me. I know I'll
understand because there is a knowing inside encouraging me to seek the meaning
- to find the freedom. I have nothing left that needs healing. What
I have is a lifetime of experiences to better understand the truth that is
buried beneath the lies of unchallenged perception.
Let me
summarize this for greater understanding:
- As we live our lives, we encounter our emotions as the result of human interactions and this sometimes causes us pain.
- Through forgiveness of self and others, we can begin to transform the pain to understanding.
- As we begin to better understand the truth of an interaction, we begin to shift our perspective.
- Our emotions are valid based on our perceptions but if we do not feel our way through our emotions and try to better understand them, we cannot forgive either others or ourselves.
- If we cannot forgive, we cannot fully glean the lesson we most wanted to learn.
- When we finally understand the truth of an interaction, when we can learn to shift our perspectives and understand our own messaging from within, the pain dissipates into understanding as we gain knowledge in the lessons learned.
- When we truly learn the lesson, we may find there isn’t really anything to forgive.
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