To relate to your pain you have to love yourself, part 5
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Pain is an effort on the part of your full self to wake you up to the obstacles that keep it from emerging.
But upon waking, you must deal with the condition of your own house.
Moves to reorganize your context will create conflict with your whole world. Your house will shake at the foundations and all the people inside will feel it.
They may support you. They may resist you. They may envy you. They may follow you.
But change in you affects everyone around you.
Everyone has to make room for it.
Everyone has to respond.
To relate to your pain you have to love yourself, part 4
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Our tendency to cling to the agencies of pain comes from our fear of lack.
Of loss.
And to an underlying, even unconscious, sense of separation from the rest of everything.
From each other. From the world. From God.
From ourselves.
It’s that separation from self on which the whole thing rests. When you deny some aspect of yourself, you are cut off from the whole.
Separated.
We grab onto whatever we’re used to. A known quantity. Even if it does not serve us. Even if it’s destructive.
A behavior.
A fantasy.
A situation.
A relationship.
For fear of being left with nothing.
Not realizing that our birthright and our most natural state is to live in connection and prosperity, based on the full, free expression of who we are.
To relate to your pain you have to love yourself, part 3
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Although we tend to recoil from pain, we also tend to cling to its causes.
It’s weird.
And it perpetuates pain.
It causes a state of lock down. We hate the recurring pain in our lives, but we do not change the root causes. In fact we repeat them, sometimes on purpose.
We don’t change the little things we can change. Because they are familiar and predictable.
We cling to life as we know it.
Because we know it.
Even if we hate it. Even if it frustrates or endangers us.
This lock down chokes off possibility, hinders vision, and creates an addiction to relief.
Not progress or growth. Not constructive, incremental change.
Relief.
The temporary superficial alleviation of pain through distraction.
To relate to your pain you have to love yourself, part 2
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We tend to recoil from pain. So we don’t easily learn from it. It can take repeated, prolonged encounters with the same form of pain before insight happens.
From malfunctions in relationship, to taking things personally at work, to holding on to anger, to world wars.
It’s the same problem: in recoiling from pain, we move not toward balance, but toward a different form of imbalance.
And that’s guaranteed to perpetuate pain.
To make it worse. To compound it over time. To weave it into the fabric of how we do things.
To relate to your pain you have to love yourself, part 1
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Without darkness there is no light. Without sorrow there is no joy. Without this there is no that blah blah blah.
Blah.
Whatever.
That’s not the point. There’s little sense in trying to explain or understand the existence of pain unless you’re going to do something about it.
The real constructive effort lies in learning how to experience it.
Because you’re going to.
Realize, however: you can engage with pain in a way that helps unlock the potential for growth hidden inside it.
We don’t have to live in fiefdom to pain.
In servitude to the exigencies of life.
Pain is a gift basket filled with vital information.
No, okay, not really a gift basket. But it’s filled with clues to what each of us needs to prosper.
To stay in the now you have to love yourself, part 5
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Presence is a kind of prayer state. The more present you are the more pure your experience of simple being.
That’s what presence is: simple being with focused consciousness.
You simply are. And you know it.
Presence is not spooky or ghostly. There’s no buzz or euphoria. It’s nothing unusual.
The fuller it is the more normal it seems. It’s just you getting up in the morning.
But really doing it.
It’s ordinary on steroids.
Really, really ordinary.
So ordinary it’s mind blowing.
It’s you and the world as they really are.
Full tilt awareness of that which is.
Self love and staying in the now, part 4
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You can learn a lot from distraction. The thoughts that keep recurring. The desires that pull you.
These things are information about how you are inside.
About aspects of you that need expression and haven’t found it yet.
In the present, if you observe, you’ll see your attitudes and orientations. The involuntary aspects of you that may or may not serve.
Stories about the past.
Stories about the future.
Stories about others.
Stories about yourself.
They show up as potential distraction. Little chances to wander away from the present into fantasy.
With work you can notice them, isolate them, heal them, and integrate them so that they no longer distort your perspective or have a negative effect on your experience.
To remain in the now you have to love yourself, part 3
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Fullness of life involves openness to whatever life hands you.
Hard.
Easy.
Whatever.
The only way to experience life with balance and completion is to be all in. Each aspect of you. Nothing left in the cupboard.
Nothing ignored, rejected, forbidden, forgotten or lost.
The fury, the lust, the child-like animation, the reliability, the volatility, the tendency to be late.
It’s all you.
To remain in the now you have to love yourself, part 2
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Authenticity is passive.
Mostly.
There are times when you have to actively be yourself. But there are aspects of authenticity you can’t “do.”
You cannot deliberately experience joy, for example. You can only allow it to happen.
And experiencing joy is part of being you. No matter what you might think to the contrary. (If you do think to the contrary, you need to practice staying in the now.)
Because being yourself is a byproduct of cultivating presence. Of residence in the now.
We all need to experience our own beauty as often as possible. And we can’t do that hypothetically. We have to step into the present moment, again and again, and take honest account of what we find.
