Pain

We live in a time when avoidance of any kind of pain is a daily goal. When we have a headache, there is a pill to make the pain go away. When we are sad, there is a pill to take to make the sadness go away. When we are hurting, we always look for the easy way out of the pain. After all, who would choose pain over suffering if such a choice were to be given?

I am certainly not advocating suffering. Like anyone else, I would prefer a life lived without suffering, either my own or anyone else’s. But I wonder how many life lessons we miss out on learning by reaching to anesthetize our pain first without learning from it, gleaning what we can from its source and becoming more fully engaged with who we are. What might we be able to accomplish by learning the lessons our suffering has to teach to us?

I also wonder if it is even possible for us to feel the full extent of the joy life has to offer if we are constantly numbing our pain without walking through it. Pain, suffering, disappointment, disillusionment, and even death are all great teachers. Are we learning the lessons they have to teach us, or are we so dedicated to pain avoidance that we choose instead to never grow in the ways we could if we were to face it head on?

I have learned (and am continuing to learn) a great deal from pain and suffering; pain and suffering in my own life and pain and suffering in the lives of others. It is very frightening as we travel down what feels like such a lonely highway because we believe no one could possibly understand what we are feeling nor would anyone really care to. Ultimately, it is true that our experience of our pain is something we have to experience ourselves; there isn’t any way to do it by proxy. But we must remember that we are part of something bigger. We are all part of each other and we share the commonality of the human experience with each and every person on this planet. We are a community of life and we are in community with something bigger than ourselves…a spirit, a guide, what some of us call God and others may see differently. When we remember to take comfort in that community and draw strength from it, where only the purest form of love and acceptance exist, there is no experience of pain that cannot be endured, learned from, and triumphed over.

Watching our Words

Ever notice how it seems to be so much easier for us to hear, believe, and incorporate criticism or negative comments about ourselves than it is to take in and accept compliments? I wonder why that is. I wonder if believing the criticism provides us with an excuse or confirmation of our feelings of powerlessness over things in our lives and allows us to remain stuck in complacency so we don’t have to face our fears, take risks, and become all that we could be. Again, it seems so easy to choose fear.

When I was in the third grade, I had a teacher make a comment I still remember as if it had been made yesterday. She said that girls aren’t naturally gifted in math and science the way boys are and generally should consider studies and careers in other areas. I don’t really know the full extent of the effect this comment had on me though I do know that when I got to college, I did end up with a degree in a field that avoided math and science, only to later go back to school and do three years of hardcore science and calculus as prerequisites for something else. I think it is fairly profound that my memory of this one negative comment made by this teacher is pretty much the only one that stands out most clearly in my memory of the third grade.

In our interactions with one another, we must realize the effect our words have on one another. For every negative, thoughtless or destructive comment we make to someone else, it will take so many more positive ones just to overcome that one negative one. Our words cause destruction in ways we cannot possibly imagine; words we give little or no thought to and yet so easily flow from our mouths. And what we are creating for others is memories; imprinting them with our words and our fear-based attitudes.

We project our own sense of insecurity and our own fears onto others in the form of negativity and anger. How unfortunate to impact someone else’s life in this way when what we could do instead is choose love. We could choose to recognize the divinity in someone else and see that person as one with us and with God, and together we could all build a world of peace, acceptance, tolerance, and unity. Sound simplistic? Well, actually, it is. It is our choice, and yet so many of us continue to make choices that will keep us rooted to our fear, to our pain, to our sadness and hopelessness. It doesn’t have to be that way. It is possible to choose differently. I remind myself every day of my choice; I choose love.

Self 101

Ever think of the subjects we study in school? We spend years learning about the past in history class, we spend years manipulating numbers in math, we learn to read and to write in our language classes, and the list goes on. We spend these years learning subjects so that we can become “educated” and make our way in the world, hopefully find a satisfying career and become “well rounded”, productive members of society.

Isn’t it interesting though that we are not offered any classes that help us to discover who we are as human beings? No classes I ever saw in college served to guide students on how to discover themselves, their essence, the deepest part of what makes a person who he/she really is. No classes to teach us about love, self discovery, even heartbreak or loneliness. The closest thing I’ve ever heard of were the love classes taught by Leo Buscaglia at the University of Southern California.

The most important gift we are given when we enter in this life is ourselves, and we spend a lifetime searching for something outside of ourselves to make us feel satisfied. We spend years studying subjects to fill our minds with things we actually could live without. And I’m not saying we should abandon our learning; the greatest gifts to all of mankind have been the product of the amazing knowledge that we have all gained over history.

My point, however, is that we seem to have neglected the most important learning process we all could ever embark upon. What we all must learn, and for some it takes longer than others, is that the only journey that really matters begins within ourselves. The knowledge of self, that gift within each one of us, that which is divinely inspired, should be the joy and certainly the focus of our learning, a learning process so few of us give enough our time to really exploring. In fact, some would argue that turning inward to really explore one’s self sounds self indulgent or even selfish. Not so. Our own process of self discovery, of learning, will inevitably create more satisfaction in our own lives, satisfaction that will affect everyone around us, create a more loving and giving attitude toward others, and make us realize that what we hold within us is the key to everything.

There really is no place like home. Continually reaching and searching outside of ourselves without having gone deep within to meet who we are at our core will inevitably repeat the cycle of disappointment, unfulfillment, and emptiness that so many seem to be suffering. God is inside us, waiting for us, having given each one of us amazing gifts, talents, capacity for love, and a unique essence all our own that is just waiting to be discovered. It isn’t a far journey to take, but it is one that will take us places we never could have possibly imagined, and if we are wise we will continue the exploration, the journey to our own self discovery, through our lifetime — and of course, always, meet ourselves with love.

More on love..

For me, living my life in love is to honor the gift of life that God gave to me. His gift to me was to give me life, my gift back to Him is how I choose to live that life. The love I give is not a love that says, “I will love you if….”, or I will love you as long as…..”, it is a love that just says, “I love you.” I love you as one of God’s creations and am genuinely excited about what I see in His magnificent work in you.

Sharing love with others is not about the expectation of receiving in return, though this can be the most difficult challenge to overcome for our own fear and insecurity. Loving with expectation for our own need defeats the purpose of giving love as a gift. Sharing our love with one another allows us to be in full unity with ourselves and with others; love being the guide toward a higher level of being, of sharing, of becoming.

Loving others for who they are requires compassion, patience and gentleness when encountering those with vastly different ways and thoughts from our own, but how exciting it is at the same time to experience the vivid rainbow of colors in the variety of different people we meet.

To find that love, to find life, all we need to do is remember to look inside of ourselves. It sounds simple enough, but we continue to look outward, seek those things external to what is inside each one of us, desperately trying to fill a void that we already have the tools we need to fill if we would just turn our gaze inward. God has placed all that is life inside of each one of us, made us each complete and whole unto ourselves; this cannot be affected by anything outside of ourselves unless we choose to remove our focus from it. It is too often our choice to separate ourselves from that love and be dominated by our fear and insecurity… this is a great source of our pain because ultimately if it is something we can only approach with fear, we are placing value in it erroneously.

Experimenting with Ourselves

“Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself and dares to become involved in experimenting with his own life.” Herbert Otto

The joy of living (as well as the discomfort) comes with the continual process of adjustment we make to change. Investing in our own lives requires us to experiment, to continue to seek out who we are, to develop, to challenge the way we think about the world and ourselves. This process is what makes us feel alive, and it also this process that causes us intense fear and discomfort. Experimenting with our lives can bring us the highest joys, a feeling of exhilaration, happiness, hope, wonder, and a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, but it requires a fundamental trust in who we are at our very core - God’s great creation in love.

Many of us prefer the comfort of complacency, of sameness, and as one day blends into the next and the next, one day we wake up and wonder where all the time went and why we didn’t take more risks, why we settled for complacency, why we didn’t grab the brass ring when we were given the opportunity.

We all have the capacity to create what we believe. If we are dissatisfied or unhappy and don’t feel things are happening for us, we have the power to create a new scene for our lives. We can surround ourselves with different people, explore a new environment, learn a new skill, paint a whole new canvas for our life. Experimenting with our lives, the one life God has given us to live, can be such an exciting and exhilarating experience. It requires belief in something different, something new, belief that the change will be for good, for happiness, for fulfillment.

We all have an abundant number of excuses we use to remain in our own complacency. While this may create a sense of comfort, how can we ever experience the highest highs in our lives when all we really strive for is sameness in ourselves? Let’s get excited about challenging ourselves to start thinking in new ways, continue our growth and explore our potential. What a world it could be if we all just committed to experiment with ourselves and banish the barriers that fear continually places in our way.

The Perfection Myth

We are all of us created the same — equals — extensions of the perfect love of God. Somewhere along the way, however, we have created a mythical world of expectations and perfection for ourselves, the painful lessons of which begin at a very early age. We learn these lessons when we are the kid who wasn’t chosen first in gym class, we learn it from teachers who thoughtlessly tell us we are weak in certain subjects, we learn it when we see the kids who are teased and bullied, we learn it when we don’t have the perfect report card, and on and on.

We continue to learn the harsh lessons of perfection during our adolescence when body image becomes so important that taken to the extreme we see young women and men develop eating disorders in the quest for perfection, start to use drugs to conform to their peer group, and even have thoughts of suicide when they feel lonely and isolated.

As adults we perpetuate the myth of perfection, constantly striving to achieve the impossible. We squelch our own creativity with thoughts that if we can’t do it perfectly it isn’t worth doing at all. We create a world that is a self-imposed nightmare of unhappiness due to our perceived inability to ever be good enough.

How many things do we never attempt because if we can’t perform to perfection it isn’t worth trying at all? How much are we denying ourselves in our realm of experience and our ability to grow as individuals simply because of our perfection myth?

For example, how many of us would love to sit at a canvas and paint a painting, but are so afraid of it not being very good or perfect enough that we never actually do it at all? Wouldn’t it be better to just sit and create and see what it is we extend of ourselves onto that canvas? Why is there always a judgment attached to the product instead of just letting those creative juices flow?

As creations of God — extensions of pure and perfect love — we are all completely acceptable as we are, exactly as we are. Let us each recognize the holiness in each other as we are, extensions of one another, and be gentler with one other, and certainly gentler with ourselves.