Healing as expansion
You could travel to one of the most beautiful destinations in the world... With a rock in your shoe, it's hard to enjoy the view. Pain and discomfort capture our attention in such a way that even with the most beautiful scenery, that damned rock in the shoe is top of mind.
Pain constricts our consciousness. It narrows the margin of our awareness. It demands we take notice.
Yet so much of our treatment is suppressing it. And of course, sometimes that’s necessary, but often, the pain we push away comes back with a vengeance.
This is especially true of emotional pain. When painful emotions arise, they tend to capture our attention in such a way that it’s hard to see beyond them - so much so, in fact, that it often feels like that pain defines us, as if we are that pain, grief, shame, sadness, etc. Is it any wonder then that we try so hard not feel?
But years of burying painful emotions don’t make them go away. And clients will often come to therapy after years of trying to keep it together, only to feel even worse about their apparent failure to do so.
To remove the rock from your shoe, you’ll actually have to attend to it. You may even need to touch it. Only then can you throw it away.
Something powerful occurs when you begin attending to old emotional wounds. They don’t disappear, but neither do they hurt as much as you feared. And then, you come to notice that there is a wound and there is a part of you witnessing the wound, which is an opening by which you may come to experience yourself as more than your wounds.
And as you notice that you are more than your wounds, you can learn to mobilize this witness within to respond to these wounds with a little more curiosity and little more compassion. In this sense, healing is akin to expansion.
The wounds may linger, but you’ve gotten bigger. The wounds no longer define you.
You are more than your feelings.
You are more than your thoughts.
You are the entire ocean.
In a drop.
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