Finding Relief from Pain and Fear

Pain and fear can be great motivators. Think about the last time you had physical pain, enough that you had to stop your regular routine and tend to it. When we are in the grips of real physical pain the ONLY course of action we can take, is to make it stop by whatever means possible. To find the cause and treat it. Physical pain is by its nature all-consuming and requires a focused approach.

Emotional pain is a little more tricky. It is powerful enough to color our experience, including how we perceive ourselves and others, and how we are responding to people and situations. Untended emotional pain festers and creates emotional infection, the kind that eats at us from the inside out.

Picture yourself having a tiff with a loved one in the morning. It is left unresolved. You marinade in it all day, perhaps for a month. The situation gets a bigger and bigger charge. To distract yourself from your own self-inflicted misery you go out drinking with friends, or you shut down emotionally, or your mind goes into hyperactivity with all of your mental ruminations. You spin out in a fear cycle and start to quietly project the worst scenario you can think of.

If this is you, or has been you at some time, you are not alone. Facing challenge and communicating well in the midst of an emotional response is a skill we all have to learn in order to be free from the suffering caused by avoiding it.

Tending to emotional pain requires a neutral mind. We need to be discerning enough to be able to engage with the discomfort without reengaging with the emotional charge.

It helps if we can see emotional pain as a resistance to what is happening in the moment. We are conditioned to believe that when we are challenged there is something ‘wrong.’ Our fear and resistance to the situation charges it energetically and creates suffering.

We need to learn how to drop the resistance to what is occurring when we are emotionally triggered, or when harboring a resentment. We need to change our interpretation of what is.

I invite you to try the following approach to moving through challenge with awareness.

1. Get still with long deep breaths for a few minutes.
2. Become present to sensations. Sense the silence within, the source of your inner power and awareness.
3. Without losing this inner connection, inquire into the fear that is creating the resistance experienced as emotional pain?

Is it fear of not being seen? Heard? Loved? Understood? Appreciated? Needed?…

4. Invoke the intelligence within yourself and drop all fear of what is arising in the present moment. See the fear as a learned behavior based on a limited understanding of your Self.
5. Open up to the possibility that exists within you in the here and now: The possibility to not attach to being right, or feeling hurt, or misunderstood, or attacked, or whatever label you are putting on it.
6. Keep breathing into your center and allow awareness of your True Self to blossom. Tune into that which is breathing through you, that feels luminous and bright. Hold this space with deep breaths until the energy of resistance, pain and fear dissolve completely.

Remember it is your choice to suffer, to hold on to resentment, to resist the moment. These choices can cost us dearly. Resolve today to free yourself. Do the above process. Come home to yourself. Have the difficult conversation. Be fearless! The moment you are, the energy that has been stuck will be free and your consciousness with it.