Pain is Wisdom’s Cry

Find love, freedom & compassion through pain.

Let’s face it, pain S-U-C-K-S! It robs us of our vitality.

But I trust my body’s wisdom. And pain is it’s only way of letting me know I’m out of alignment. It’s my body asking me to listen to its message. And I’ve learned it will continue to escalate until I face it’s insistence.

Trauma, overexertion and tension are the culprits of my pain. While trauma requires therapy and overexertion requires rest, tension requires that I listen.

What you may not consider when listening to your tension is, it’s often rooted in another time and is multidimensional in its nature. It simmers unnoticed until something triggers it into expressing; and when it does, your mind and body unite in its tantrum.

On the day I gathered my courage and composure to utter for the first time about dad’s nighttime visits in my bedroom, mom’s reply was, “It’s not MY fault, I didn’t know!” My body had been holding onto this sexual abuse story in silence for 25 years!

The anger, fear, confusion and sadness that plagued my body as tension, was trying to find a pathway out by voicing my longstanding secret. But the pathway out was blocked, so now every cell became engorged with rage! I felt like I was being annihilated by electrical shock waves. My body shook as my mind ranted! “It’s still all about you and your needs––I don’t really matter?!” From my view at the time, I wasn’t worth protecting, I wasn’t lovable, not then and not now.

Sometimes it’s just too painful to listen to our feelings, so our mind steps in to reason with the pain—blame it away. But we can’t think (or blame) our way out of tension, we have to feel our way out. And here’s the clincher, allowing the body to feel goes far beyond its physical tweaks, it’s crying out our emotional wounds.

Here’s how the mind and body relate:

  • The body’s soft tissues (muscles, sinews, organs) archive every emotion you experience, while the mind remembers the details around the emotion. Your body feels; your mind thinks.
  • When a disappointment or trauma happens your body’s soft tissues tense up and your mind creates a belief to help you make sense out of the happening or survive its immediate danger.
  • This belief, though useful at the time, was made under duress and its usefulness is likely short-lived. But there you are unknowingly operating under a misaligned belief well after the incident. At least until you’re triggered back into it, like a time warp!
  • The physical tension and emotional distress that lives in the body reactivates. Its painful grip is either out of per portion with real time events or creeps in as a low grade persistent whine. Meanwhile the mind spouts its misaligned belief with so much certainty that you miss its lie.
  • Anger, worry, sorrow, fear plague your body causing dis-ease. Pain in the form of poor posture, emotional distress and sickness follow, until the mind’s belief and body’s tension change the story—together creating a new experience.

It took another 15-years to address my nighttime story again out load. Mom went into denial, forgetting what I had shared, and I set out to unravel my body’s tension and mind’s unlovable belief using posture and movement, and changing my relationship with resistance inside and out.

I found ease through mind-body alignment.

I listened to the layers of trauma when challenged, experienced as tension’s pain. I then decreased the challenge intensity to where the pain wasn’t triggered. This gave my tension space to expand, express and exhale. As the tension disentangled itself, my strength was renewed and redefined.

Strength is now an alignment between my inherent innocence––mental curiosity—and my wisdom––emotional/physical truth––keeping me genuinely interested in each moment of connection and discernment. It is a posture of wonder.

Once we recognize our body carry’s our emotional baggage, our pain becomes our teacher. What we feel, physically and emotionally, becomes meaningful to our future and we are inspired to listen.

Our body’s posture is our first defender against chronic tension; and, it’s crucial to being proactive in our search for happiness and well-being.

As we deliberately improve our posture we learn to distinguish between our strength and our tension. And we unravel our tension and unlock the misaligned beliefs that hold us hostage to the pain of our past.

 

Click for a FREE Video to Surrender Tension in 8-Minutes!