Tag Archive for: pain

The Healing Treasures of Pain

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There are times that we choose pain and times that pain chooses us. When we’re chosen, it’s easy to feel victimized, and we are. But to heal, I believe, one needs to find the gift within the pain.

Being open to pain’s healing is like having a gift that keeps on giving. I was recently elevated out of a childhood pain of parental abandonment. One of those low-grade emotional conditions that you just live with and may not even name as pain. Instead, you may live in avoidance of its squeeze.

Avoiding pain’s squeeze, unfortunately and inevitably, catches up to you.

I met a man about a year ago at a favorite cafe whom I felt uncomfortable around. You know that feeling when your gut churns, your eyes squint, and you take a step back. Through the past year he was a regular customer, so I put a polite smile on my face and gave him the benefit of my doubt.

Well, I will be more trusting of my gut’s instinct moving forward.

While my boyfriend, Anthony, was chatting with someone else one evening, this man leaned into my breathing space and started asking questions about my fitness. He quickly shifted his commentary to my sexy, sophisticated, presence. The most beautiful in the cafe.

If this were my boyfriend whispering these intimacies, I would lean into his love and devotion. But, in this case it felt over-indulgent and self-serving. My brain froze. No words came to change the course of this man’s momentum.

As I shift uncomfortably in my seat, he slides his hand up my side and cops a feel of my right breast. A blatant uninvited intrusion of my space, body and relationship with Anthony, disguised in a gesture to steady me on the bar stool. But, let’s be clear, I needed no steadying.

Rather than stating my boundaries, all I could do was excuse myself. I moved to the other end of the bar until he left.

This moment of freezing is scary. It’s the same freeze that happened repeatedly in my childhood when my father inappropriately came into my bedroom at night. I felt, and feel, helpless, alone and terrified in these moments.

Different than my childhood story, in my adult story, the freeze is what scares me. This man’s conduct was inappropriate, but not threatening my safety. In these situation it’s easy to dismiss creepy disrespect, and instead, judge my muted self-respect.

I shared the incident with a woman who, unbeknownst to me, had had a similar altercation with this man. The story spread and an owner/bartender heard the report. My next visit there, my boyfriend held an outdoor table for us, because the man was inside at the bar.

What happened next blew my mind!

The bartender came out and confirmed the story. As it was told to me afterward, he returned inside and slid the man’s check in front of him. The man slid it back to him saying, he didn’t ask for a check. It was slid back in the man’s direction again and this time paid.

When the man exited the cafe I jumped up, now unfrozen and prepared, to tell him that he’d made me uncomfortable and set a clear boundary. But that’s not what happened!

The bartender followed him out and stopped him just outside the cafe’s dining area.
The man was asked to not return.

Soon after the bartender returned to his post at the bar, a gentleman friend stuck his head out the door and said, “There’s a seat in here for you Tammy.” When we went inside, a group of people ushered me into a love cocoon. I felt treasured.

I was stood up for, protected and loved by all of them. I was offered the cocoon my family of origin couldn’t offer.

I say to the woman, who had had the same experience, that I was intending to speak to the man and practice standing up for myself. She said, “I understand that, but can you accept being stood up for and feel safety from that?”

My whole life has been about developing mind body strength. It has served me well. But the self respect, love and trust gained by this strength isn’t to separate me from the respect, love and trust of others.

The pain I carry around from my childhood was just made lighter by letting others in. Not by becoming more independent and self-entrusted. I’m learning that it also takes strength to depend on others and trust they’ll be there. I am healing and I treasure these moments pain has constructed and amplified.

I would love to hear from others who have lived with a similar ‘freeze’ response to disrespect.

 

The Hidden Treasure in Pain

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As I embark on a second tattoo I am often asked, “Why would you put yourself through so much pain?” As I listen for my answer, I’m flooded with various images of painful activities that I’ve chosen to endure. I retort with, “Pain is temporary, but the ‘result’ is forever.”

So what is the ‘result’ I am searching for?
And, am I any different than you?

The burn of my tattoos results in a shared celebration of my life story and values; the ache of my muscles from a workout results in my ownership of grace and power; the lingering buzz in my head after 100’s of miles on a motorcycle results in knowing that I’m a survivor.

Pain magnifies, amplifies and actualizes a desired result. If you allow it.
Pain also magnifies, amplifies and actualizes the fear of more pain. If you allow it.

It’s so easy to complain about our pain. But complaining is what causes the suffering. After considering our pain’s request for our care, can we look a little deeper?

When we realize we’ve chosen our particular pains—created the life we’re living—we see that there’s a pleasure that all pain leans on, or we wouldn’t have chosen it.

Together, pleasure and pain create a flow. Like death and rebirth. Allow the current to flow between them—refrain from bracing against the fear of more pain—and you simply become the mid-wife to a deeper pleasure.

I’m not talking about a kinky fetish where pain is a turn-on. I’m talking about pain as a turn-off to living a full life.

Bracing against pain keeps you in pain. Appreciating pain as a journey into your heart, soul and conscience imparts self-knowledge.

The same lesson is shared in mind and body.

The pain in my heart from losing my sister to covid results in knowing the depth and beauty of my love for her; the frustration of being distracted by my monkey-mind results in creating conscious change in my mindset; the uncertainty that surrounds my aging mother’s care results in learning how to prepare for my own aging needs.

Allow the pain and you allow the pleasure. A hidden treasure that results in a sacred appreciation for the ups and downs of your life. An appreciation, l believe, we are all searching for to be happy.

Pain defines pleasure by being opposite in nature. Pain also delivers hidden treasures by swimming with the current through it. Hold course to find your deeper you.

Feel. Heal. Live. Explore. Love. Change.

 

Pain is Wisdom’s Cry

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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.

 

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