A Perspective on Befriending Pain

By Wendy De Rosa, Intuitive Healer

I was compelled to write this article about pain as I was recovering from an injury. As a clairvoyant, intuitive healer, my work in the world is to help people heal and transform along their path.  However, I wasn’t feeling so helpful during this challenging circumstance that led me to explore and observe my own pain. At the time, so many people in my life were experiencing suffering in varying degrees and looked to me for support.  It was soon clear to me that I was going through pain to understand the layers of suffering, and alternative ways to working through pain.   As I was having my own revelations and witnessing people around me in pain, I was receiving intuitive messages to write about this, as an offering of support to others who get stuck in pain and suffering.   May these insights be helpful.

I sustained an injury, right in the middle of one of the busiest times of my healing practice.  I was in mid-process with many weekly clients, feeling really strong in my life.  Then all of a sudden, a fall in yoga brought my life to a complete standstill.  Funny I should call it a standstill, because the injury happened when I fell flat on my back out of a handstand in a yoga class in June (of 2008).  My head bounced on the floor.  Doctors determined that I had suffered a concussion and whiplash.  I was in tremendous head pain. I experienced vertigo, confusion, disrupted speech, and had some nerve damage, rendering me unable to function at a basic level for a few weeks.  It was the 3rd concussion I’d suffered, so the injury was more severe than it would have been were it my first head injury.  At the same time, many others around me were suffering—everything from losing a child to depression to chronic physical pain to emotional crisis. It seemed that everything was crashing down on many people at once, and my physical condition was so bad that I couldn’t help anyone.  All I could do was be inside my own pain.  I was the healer needing healing myself.

While I was in pain there was no way that I could fully understand why it was happening.   I figured my body was way over due for a break and that was part of it.  However, I knew that when the pain subsided, I would gain clarity on what this was about. So I let go of trying to understand why my injury happened.  Basically, I didn’t try to reason with my pain.  Instead, I chose to accept that it was there to teach me something.  So, I stopped and accepted that this is where I am for now and I chose to approach healing my pain in a new way.

I began to focus on the specific emotions that my head pain was bringing up.  I breathed through the emotions and I listened to what my body was trying to tell me to do for months prior to my fall: Slow Down and REST!  I took a break from my daily routine because I had no other choice but to relax. I received acupuncture treatments, chiropractic and cranial sacral care, EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), and lots of supportive words from friends.   With every adjustment or needle that touched my skin, I prayed, “Dear God, thank you for the ability to heal.  I release my pain (or emotion or whatever it was I was feeling in the moment) with this adjustment.” For a good couple of weeks, I felt almost as if my body was reconfiguring.  Somehow I was changing and I didn’t know how or why; all I could do was release the urge to control and the need to know and let the shifting happen.

Each time my head pounded and I experienced shooting pain in my neck, I noticed that my tendency was to disassociate from the pain and direct my anger or frustration toward other things, such as my unfinished To-Do list, or people not being able to understand the pain I was in because I looked fine. Once I breathed more deeply into the pain moments, I experienced waves of unresolved memories from my past.  In my intuitive work, when I look at someone energetically, and see that they have the energy of a past situation sitting on their shoulders, for example, I see that they are unresolved with something that is contributing to their shoulder pain.  So there I was, experiencing pain but watching flashes of pictures in my mind that I took as parts of stored energy moving from my subconscious to my consciousness in order to be healed and released. Once I became aware of the memory and the emotion connected to it, I could reconcile with myself around it.  I spent many hours consciously forgiving myself, and others, and letting go of what felt unresolved. The pain lessened, and I understood that the frustration around the unfinished To-Do list was a vehicle to access these deeper emotions.

What came out of my healing process was not figuring out how to feel better as fast as I could, but becoming aware of what was underneath the pain and facing it.  This process is what allowed my recovery time to accelerate.  Sometimes, I see clairvoyantly that there is a bubbling force in our cells beneath the body layer.  In order to truly heal and be at peace, it must be acknowledged or else it makes itself known—through pain, suffering, catastrophe or illness.  Often the bubbling force is a suppressed emotion (or lots of suppressed emotions) that never got the proper outlet, or listening ear, or witness. The suppression results in diseases such as pain, anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue, illness, and the list can go on.   It’s possible that pain is serving to get the attention or care you didn’t get earlier in life- not necessarily a healthy pattern, but one that makes being in pain a way to get needs met.

I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on pain or trauma, but as an intuitive healer I’ve been a witness to pain and suffering of all kinds in my 10 + years of practice. I’ve watched many people go through their own dark tunnels or “rites of passage”, and seen them come out the other side into the light. I’ve also gone through my own.  In order for us to not get stuck in our tunnels it is important that we ask for help as it’s needed, and that we look to the support of friends, healers and God.  To do this you need to call upon that  “special something” inside to truly heal and light your way through the darkness.  This “special something” is your will power.  In my experience, will power, confidence, and inner strength—give you the ability to acknowledge the light of the Divine in yourself, hear your inner voice and to respond to it.  It is the ability to call upon the strength of the soul to overcome pain, which can be dominating in some cases.  I see will power as an inner guiding light in the core of the body.  Often it is in the area of the solar plexus, right around and a little above the navel.  Everyone has will power, but if your will feels weak, then you may feel hopeless.  When that happens, you are truly at the soul’s crossroads and it’s time to find your voice and have a conversation with God – soul to soul, maybe for the first time ever, so that you can build enough spiritual stamina to go on.

Pain puts you in your body.  There is no doubt about it.  When you are in pain there is nothing else you can do but feel the pain.  Your body hurts so much, and the loss or suffering is so great, that your conscious mind wants to find a reason for this pain.  “Why did this happen to me?”  “What did I do to deserve this?”  “Who can get me out of this pain?” If no reason is found, then you go into blame. You blame yourself, others, or God. You become angry. There may not be a reason at all for why this pain is happening.  It may be simply part of your path and a test of your inner strength.  Or it’s all the years of un-resolved emotions compounded.  It’s easy to inch toward the slippery slope of victim-hood, but you have an alternative: to look within and find your spiritual connection to the Divine.

These are the moments when the door between you and the Divine is just waiting for you to knock.  You may have denied your own intuition over and over again in your life, and in fact such denial may have led you to your suffering.  And the anger you are experiencing is not about who did what, but rather, that you knew deep down that your soul was trying to tell you something and you didn’t listen.  You knew what you needed, but you denied your self. Maybe you had a few moments where you heard your higher self in communion with the Divine and it was too much, too scary, and too true, and it would require you to change your life course completely, but that would be too much work.  So, there you are in pain, looking for answers outside yourself, when really the anger is toward yourself for not listening or trusting yourself in the first place.

The body will break down if we do not listen to our intuition, if we do not feel our feelings, and if we stray from our Divine path.  Our cells have their own intelligence and we underestimate the wisdom of our physical body and its ability to speak to us.   We have a soul responsibility to take care of ourselves—to listen to our inner voice, to ask when we need something, to let go when we withhold.  If we do not take responsibility for the fact that we put ourselves in the situation we are in, no matter who said what along the way, then we will constantly drain will power. And we will not have accepted the gifts that were given to us in the first place. Life force can’t flow through a body to heal if there’s no will power to say, “Yes, I accept.” And I mean accept on all levels.

What I’ve come to understand through my injury is that being in pain teaches us about our relationship to emotions. Our emotions influence our physical state of being. It is through understanding and feeling our feelings, that pain in the body can be relieved.I grew up with in a highly energetic Italian household where no one held back emotionally.  I mean, lots of yelling, drama and vying for attention. I didn’t have the background on how to separate emotionally and not take things personally. Often my emotional state of being would make or break my day

After years of working to shift this, I was able to internally change some belief systems in my body.  I did this through the practice of non-attachment. This practice can apply to material items, or it can be applied to emotions by witnessing them rather than letting them over-take.  I did this by witnessing my emotions in waves—temporary emotions that came in, welled up, and then passed. “I don’t have to BE angry,” I began to tell myself, “I am not anger.  I am experiencing anger right now.” I would let myself go through all the motions of anger, like the pressure welling up in my chest, and the anxiousness, and the fuming streams of words.  I would let it boil up inside me and then took deep breaths until it dissipated.  I accept that it was a wave of an emotion, and it really didn’t have to do with the present situation, the present situation was merely an avenue for this anger to come up.  I felt relief from this practice and it allowed me to not get stuck in the emotion.

One way I was able to get the emotion-as-wave concept into my consciousness was through practicing vinyasa yoga.  I studied Prana Vinyasa Flow with renowned teacher Shiva Rea and I learned that vinyasa—which means flow—is not just a series of poses connected together with breath, but more. Vinyasa is an arch of a life experience that has a beginning, a middle and an end.  In yoga, sequences are linked together based on what their purpose is, perhaps to open the hips or the shoulders, or the heart. A brief example is an opening Om, a middle peak or challenging pose, followed by finishing poses.  Within the body of the class there are smaller sequences, each with their own beginning, middle, and end.  The Vinyasa experience is mirrored in life through the understanding that there are waves and cycles to our emotions.  Once I understood that, I could apply the concept of Vinyasa to the wave sequence of my emotions, I found solace in knowing that I was not stuck in this dark place, and that it was a wave I just had to see through to it’s completion.

Pain can be addressed similarly to the anger example.  However, it all depends on our attachments.  Detaching from and witnessing our emotions is a spiritual practice.  When we have too many attachments, expecting that life will go a certain way for us, it’s very hard to practice non-attachment.  So, the first thing that needs to happen is a shift in consciousness around understanding that we cannot control life.  Things that are beyond our control happen everyday.  And if the unexpected didn’t happen to you today, it likely happened to someone else you know, and that can affect you, too.  We cannot expect that we will have a flawless life, but we can choose to be okay inside, and even joyful at the core of our being.  Non-attachment may take shifting some major belief systems, and having strong will power, coupled with an openness to the Divine can help you make the changes that are needed.

This act of calling upon your will power to build spiritual stamina, or to begin a relationship to the Divine is what will help your weather the storms in your life.  For deep suffering, the kind that feels helpless and imprisoning, or any kind of dark tunnel, consider these options:

1)    Ask for help.  Sometimes you need a guide to help you  through the dark tunnel because the pain is so great that you can’t hear you inner voice.  The Divine works through all of us.  Find the healer, helper, minister, author, friend, or particular someone who can help give you supportive words of wisdom, so that you can begin building strength for healing.

2)    Notice if you are holding any belief systems about your life that are no longer true for you.  It might be time to re-negotiate with yourself what you believe to be true now as opposed to what you were taught to believe.  Often times our dark pains come from oppressive beliefs that we unconsciously adopted.  With what beliefs are your heart and soul no longer in alignment? Choose your new beliefs for yourself.  Sometimes it can be that simple.

3)    Consider witnessing your emotions arising as waves.  Simply telling yourself, “I feel sadness” instead of, “I am sad” gives your system the very important message that your identity is not sadness.  You are a person experiencing a wave of sadness. It may be a big one and last a while, but if you detach your identity from it, you will lessen its grip.

4)    Begin, return to, or continue a relationship with the Divine.  Define for yourself what God means to you now in your life, and start praying.

If you are reading this and saying to yourself, “Yeah, Wendy, you don’t know anything about the pain I’m feeling. You’ve never lost a child or had chronic pain,” I would say in return:  no one can take pain away from you.  You have to live with and reconcile what’s left in your life.  I have seen the power of healing. I have seen people transform themselves from a paraplegic state to walking unassisted.  I have seen the power of a person’s will trump cancer and I’ve seen possibility come out of a devastating hardship.  So, consider that if you find the suffering is too much, then you might be with your back against the wall at a spiritual crossroads.  If you don’t want to slide down any further, you have two choices: to look inside or to look up. Pain can be a spiritual crisis between the body and the soul, and spiritual crisis’ tend to stem from a deep lack in faith.

Once you begin to have faith in yourself and the Divine, you will have taken your power back into your hands, and will not be alone.  At that point, you just might want to read this article again, from the beginning.

Wendy De Rosa Resides in Austin, TX.  She conducts healing sessions in person and over the phone all over the country.  Every 3rd Tuesday of the month Wendy offers a Free Conference Call Healing for any one to call in and listen. For more information visit: www.heldinlight.com.