Pain can either shut you down and hold you in stasis or it can break you open. It can either keep you locked into the suffering or it can break you free from self protection and fear. The world around us can tell us, or show us, we should hold it all in. The world can tell us to feel ashamed of the way we have been hurt because it proves we are flawed and unworthy. You can believe that, I know I did for a long time. There seems to be another option available for me though.
I can allow what I have experienced in life to allow me to feel. I can feel that injury and have compassion for anyone who has had to bear that as well. I can feel empathy because I know first hand how much it hurts. I can also feel the bliss of life, the way we do as children, through it because it makes me able to choose another way. I get to choose to be a perpetrator (mirroring back into the world what I have seen), a victim (staying flooded by the emotional impact) or BECOME. The "other way" is the becoming. It is the path of least resistance. It is the way out. It is the way.
By becoming I am speaking here of dropping all the things you picked up along the way that are what you are not. You are not your beatings. You are not your humiliation. You are not your rape. You are not your drug/alcohol use. You are not your poverty. You are not your molestation. You are not a terminated pregnancy. You are not your pain. None of these ordeals are us, they are events. Events are transitory. Transitory is not truth. Truth is ever constant. Truth is unchangeable. The truth of you is not broken apart by all your pain. The truth of you is your hopes, your dreams, your joys, your love. And it is this truth we seek to protect when the ordeals come.
I am not going to say that this becoming is easy. The intensity of being broken open vs. the prolonged pain of stuffing that pain down and closing yourself tightly in trying to avoid anymore pain is more profoundly dark. Doing this has gotten none of us where we want to be. Where we want to be is in that hope, in our dreams, in our joys and in love. Choosing this place instead of the truth it is an endless cycle and the only escape IS the becoming.
I can allow what I have experienced in life to allow me to feel. I can feel that injury and have compassion for anyone who has had to bear that as well. I can feel empathy because I know first hand how much it hurts. I can also feel the bliss of life, the way we do as children, through it because it makes me able to choose another way. I get to choose to be a perpetrator (mirroring back into the world what I have seen), a victim (staying flooded by the emotional impact) or BECOME. The "other way" is the becoming. It is the path of least resistance. It is the way out. It is the way.
By becoming I am speaking here of dropping all the things you picked up along the way that are what you are not. You are not your beatings. You are not your humiliation. You are not your rape. You are not your drug/alcohol use. You are not your poverty. You are not your molestation. You are not a terminated pregnancy. You are not your pain. None of these ordeals are us, they are events. Events are transitory. Transitory is not truth. Truth is ever constant. Truth is unchangeable. The truth of you is not broken apart by all your pain. The truth of you is your hopes, your dreams, your joys, your love. And it is this truth we seek to protect when the ordeals come.
I am not going to say that this becoming is easy. The intensity of being broken open vs. the prolonged pain of stuffing that pain down and closing yourself tightly in trying to avoid anymore pain is more profoundly dark. Doing this has gotten none of us where we want to be. Where we want to be is in that hope, in our dreams, in our joys and in love. Choosing this place instead of the truth it is an endless cycle and the only escape IS the becoming.
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