Why should we have to deal with our pain?

We all have pasts and pain and although some worse than others, its all relevant. Yet, as human beings we spend our lives running away from whatever hurts, from that which is too painful to look at, and for many of us, that which we don't even know is causing us pain.

Pain is easily disguised and takes many forms. Our pain sends us signals everyday, begging us to look, and face it. Most often our pain comes out through our relationships. Relationships with our parents, friends, and spouses, even our colleagues and bosses. Our unresolved pain is forever triggered in the universe's attempt to help us to resolve it. In relationships its often those who we are the closest to that seem to mirror our inner conflict and turmoil. That is why so many teachers and spiritual principles are based on the fact that relationships are our biggest teachers, because they enable us to take a deeper look at what is really going on within ourselves.

When our pain is triggered by another human being our instant reaction is to get defencive, which is completely natural. We want to protect ourselves from those threatening feelings that are coming up, those feelings that we have put away for so long. So we think that by getting defencive we can avoid those feelings we hate to feel, yet it doesn't work that way. Because in a situation where both people are on the defencive, nothing gets resolved.

The question is, can we try and face that which we hate to? Can we be vulnerable so that the other knows that they have triggered a wound of ours? Here is where we as both men and women have pride. Pride as well as feeling that showing vulnerability means we are weak. The other issue is that we feel that if we show our vulnerability then the other has the 'upper hand' and so begins the power struggle.

There is not one person on this planet that has not had some form of emotional pain in their pasts. So why not acknowledge that it is there,  and make it relevant in our lives because its a part of who we are? Our pain wants to be seen, wants to be heard, so see it for what it is so that it doesn't have such power over us, so that we can let it go. The thing is, we wont die and nothing is going to happen to us if we go to that place. We will still wake up the next morning and life will carry on. Our pain cannot destroy us, it only brings us to the most real and authentic parts of ourselves.

People have become so desperate that they will do anything to avoid feeling pain, from drinking to drugs, eating, to splurging on new cars, clothes, the latest of everything so that they can make themselves believe that everything is A OK because their outer world looks that way. And many go through their whole lives avoiding it only to find that it has manifested into their physical bodies as deathly illnesses and diseases as well as depression and anxiety. Trust me I have first hand experience in this.

If our issues are not dealt with, we land up putting it onto our children, and this is why dysfunctional family patterns go back centuries because no one has taken responsibility for their issues or dealt with their pain. Every unresolved relationship, family dynamic and traumatic and or painful situation will be put onto our children when they are born, and their children, until someone decides that they want to break the harmful family pattern.

Now I am not saying that we have to now go and sit and think of our pasts or those things that are causing us pain but realise that when the time comes that we are again triggered by it, we need to open our minds and have a deeper look at what it is, and where it comes from. We need to just acknowledge that it is there. Just like you wake up one morning and say "wow I am in a good mood', you can do the same for something painful that has come up.

Often we don't know where its coming from, so we just need to sometimes sit with it. Sit with it meaning feel it. We are so quick to brush things off as being silly or invalid, but nothing we feel is silly or invalid, and the act of dismissing and rejecting those feelings is basically the rejection of ourselves.

As much as we would all like to be, we are not just Joy. In fact, talking about that which is painful and uncomfortable will only eventually make it less painful and the the joy that comes from it is like nothing we could ever imagine. A happiness, finally free from the chains of our darkness.