RECLAMING YOUR TRUE SELF By Angela Dunning
Finding Purpose in Pain None of us want to be in pain, emotionally or physically. Quite naturally we do all we can to avoid it or when we do have pain, we try to immediately medicate it away. This has become our way of relating to both our physical bodies and our emotions. We want to just feel good, happy and healthy all of the time. This is, of course, understandable as pain is unpleasant; it hurts! It slows us down; sometimes to the point of stopping us in our normal daily life altogether.
“To be in my body also means to suffer.” ~Marion Woodman
When in chronic pain, or through a sudden accident or illness we find that our normal daily life is utterly disrupted. We might break a limb and suddenly have to take time off work, be home-bound, depending on others which we might find incredibly difficult. If we are striving for a more conscious life we might dive into this experience and explore all of our feelings and thoughts, resistances and anxieties about being suddenly out of our normal, busy routine and instead, plunged into an immediate and intimate relationship with our body, which we normally over-work and take for granted. But, it’s easy to also miss this as the opportunity it could be, seeking only to recover as soon as possible so that we may resume our usual hectic externally-driven lifestyle once more, glad to be out of pain and back to full health. I came across this quote recently by philosopher Gerard Heard: “Pain is excess energy crying out for release.” This really struck a chord with me as I have been suffering from physical pain for much of the past two decades, primarily in my back and more recently my pelvis, and I have always had an inkling that there is an underlying psychological/psychic reason for my pain. That it was somehow trying to illuminate my core and chronic struggle in this lifetime to become and live who I really am, including all of my true potentials. I suspect this because I know I have kept myself small and safe for most of my life, only daring to grow from time to time and I have long suspected, especially since having long-term back pain, that I do not fully inhabit my true height and power. I have kept myself both physically and metaphorically smaller than I actually am capable of being.
60 THEEDENMAGAZINE.COM e March 2020