Emotional Pain Never Heals

Certain experiences of anxiety, fear or pain in a present moment scenario can sometimes seem to strum the chords of prior episodes of anxiety, fear or pain. This may cause many other similar past experiences to rise to the surface of your consciousness, making one simple episode seem like a bonfire.  It's like discovering you whacked your knee on something and a bruise followed but you didn't realize you had it or had completely forgotten about it.  Then you either hit it again or otherwise touch it and the pain returns to be felt yet again.  It makes me wonder if emotional pain ever really heals.  We suffer anxiety, fear or pain for a multitude of reasons, but that's not the point of this blog.  Stick with me for just a moment as I strive to develop this point. 

As we go through our lives and experience various events, we assign anxious, fearful or painful thoughts.  At some level, it is almost as if these things are written into the archives of your psyche.  As you move away from those moments where you have experienced such events, you start to forget about the negative aspects of your experiences.  But then, suddenly, something similar comes up and the unconscious mind reaches through all of its archived records to find similar experiences from which to judge or assess the current experience.  In so doing, the thoughts will strum the chords of other painful experiences and seemingly set them loose, leaving you feeling emotionally raw and out of proportion with the current experience.

So, I cannot help but wonder about this:  Emotional pain never heals. Our anxieties stem from fear, and this fear stems from the thought of pain.  This is not the first time I've considered this line of thinking.  A superficial wound will heal but the memories of it won't necessarily leave us.  I wonder, when thinking of these emotional wounds - the anxiety, fear and pain, if we will not heal until we begin to better understand our thoughts.  It seems that until you fully understand the extent of a situation that leads to thoughts of anxiety, fear and pain, you won't heal them but rather nullify their existence.  Take the simple knowledge gained from not taking things personally as an example.  We've begun to truly learn and understand that most people who express themselves in mean and insulting ways are not really telling you anything about you, but rather are telling us about themselves.  When you think about it, we once felt the pain of these attacks, and those wounds gathered and collected throughout our whole lives.  Finally, we come to understand that some people are mean just because of their own battle scars, and this has nothing to do with us at all. The pain that was written, inscribed deeply within our psyches, becomes unwritten through understanding.

We transform our suffering through understanding it's purpose.  Oh, I know, it is a huge leap to understand that some emotional challenges have a purpose.  This is especially true when certain experiences seem by their very design to serve no purpose other than our emotional destruction.  But wait, if you go on with that thought, you spill your power out in blame and fear, and there is no healing or resolution to be had.  There is only the continuous collection of more anxiety, fear and pain.  Through seeking greater understanding, you begin to truly know that life is not designed to emotionally destroy you. Essentially, you need to step back and see a much broader framework from a greater and higher perspective of love, compassion and understanding. When you can accomplish this, ultimately, the pain is transformed and simply disappears.  There is nothing then to heal because you have begun to fully realize the illusion of suffering.  I'm not saying anxiety, fear and pain are not real when your thoughts are embroiled in the entertaining of these things.  I'm saying that if you can shift your perspective for long enough, stand in your own power and take responsibility for your play, your actors, your sets, your behaviors and your action through striving for greater understanding, you nullify the effects of pain, it seems.

I'm toying with these ideas not to blame the victims or rub salt in anyone's wounds.  I'm writing from my own experiences of having those chords of pain strummed so that they rise to the surface to the point I am raw, in an active state of pain and striving to understand it.  I do not fear pain.  I see all three of these topics as very closely aligned. No matter which aspect we embrace, each time one of these things crop up we are being given an opportunity to better understand.  If I step back from the shadows of victim-hood and blame, and stand squarely in the light owning my emotions, my thoughts and the illusions of my own perceptions, I'm free. 

These are tough thoughts to translate beautiful dreamers and I so hope in some way I'm getting through.  I may have to take another shot or two at articulating these thoughts to help them crystallize more concretely from the pureness of feeling within to the simple language we typically use to converse.  So much meaning is lost when you have a feeling and yet try to define it with limited words.  You'll understand when you get there, this much I know.  But I have this silly thought that if I can articulate what is rising, it may serve as a light for someone else who wandered ever long in the darkness as I did.   As I'm writing I'm thinking, questioning and testing.  I'm on an amazing and wonderful journey of understanding in this life and am delighted by each discovery whether it hurts, perplexes or confounds me.  I know I'll understand because there is a knowing inside encouraging me to seek the meaning to find the freedom.  I have nothing left that needs healing.  What I have is a lifetime of experiences to better understand the truth that is buried beneath the lies of unchallenged perception.  I'm talking myself in circles now, so we will end this bout of mental meandering and leave it for you to take it or not. ~Blessings of infinite love, light, compassion and most of all, a full depth of understanding to set you free.

© 2013 Jaie Hart (Photo, random internet find)

Special thanks Liam for your understanding, love, support and most excellent help with making sense of this download with me.