Releasing Your Being

We know that pain is far from beautiful in its initial experience of heart wrenching agony. It appears as a chasm that is nowhere near complete or whole. It tears at us, and urges us to feel that if we don't identify with what happened, we may as well forget our lives altogether. Our actions become a response to the pain we feel and our own expressions of life lived are sometimes shadowed by living in our fears. This is where it becomes possible to feel our own pain return to us after being forgotten for a long time. We feel our lives change in response to what caused us pain, and that is what we identify with when wellness seems to be gone. The conflict can linger in our lives even when the pain is forgotten. This is apparent when we try to be whole and run into the wall of hurt that seemed to be gone.

Some days these feelings seem to be so present there seems no way through. Other days, a wall emerges in the midst of everyday routine that appears as the ordinary and mundane fades into reminders of feeling that hadn't occurred to us in years. As that present moment is seasoned with a taste of a feeling that we have felt before it can be recognized as those old feelings that lingered in our subconscious until we found that it was woundedness and resentment that pulled us under.

These feelings, be they disappointment, loneliness, bitterness, as any myriad complex of emotional mashups have roots in the daily life. The walls that emerge, seemingly out of nowhere, come from the build up of this pain that has been swept under the rug until it cannot be ignored any further.

We cannot always stay close to those who have hurt us when we need to be whole again. Sometimes we need to be accepting and patient with our lives as we take the steps to be where we need to be whole again.  It is easier to respond to our own hearts with an understanding of the tension and the shame that these instances cause us to feel. We can be conflicted in ways we didn't even know we could, and when we see our humanity, we see that feeling whole includes our being ourselves in the broken places of our lives.

Being face to face with the experience of our hurt places is a frightening idea. It brings us to a place of unease, until there is a recognition of who that person with experiences of pain and wellness together is. As pain is understood, by feeling the impact of it in our lives and those around us, we find it no longer overpowering us. It gives us a connection to our lives and our true nature as we use what makes us alive to bring ourselves back to living.