Healing our pain

We go to enormous lengths to avoid feeling pain. Does it work? Not in my experience. It might work temporarily. Connecting to pain, our pain, fully feeling it, dissolves the pain. We can paint pretty pictures of our pain, create beautiful metaphors, generate endless analogies and while these are really useful communication tools, do they really help us to fully connect to our pain? Sometimes they can, but more often than not in my experience, they lead to an over thinking and an analysis and interpretation which can often distance us from our pain so we don't have to feel it. We think our pain is resolved but we don't know and feel it is resolved. One is an experience, the other is not. Resolving pain is a feeling exercise and one we need to go through for our own sake. I believe we can't avoid feeling our pain no matter how much, or how hard, we try.

Nire Valley, Tipperary, Ireland

When some people talk of spirituality and people who are spiritual, I find it difficult to identify with what they mean or what I think they mean. Spirituality for me is not a religion, nor is it a practice, it is who we are. The spirit or life force (life energy, chi, prana etc) that animates and gives life to our bodies makes us all spiritual. Spirit is an old word for energy and has nothing to do with organised religion or any religious practice. You don't have to 'do' anything to be spiritual, you already are. For me, healing means fully connecting our spirit with our bodies; embodying our spirit. The connection feels vitalising, nourishing, healing and joyful.

When we dissociate, which is an extremely common response to pain or trauma, and we all dissociate to a greater or lesser degree, our spirit/energy detaches from our body. The greater the pain (and that's subjective) and more prolonged, the more detached our spirit/energy can become from our body. The split or severance is akin to an injury or wound and we feel this disconnection as physical and emotional pain. Our life energy stops flowing and dis-ease and dis-order may result. By feeling our pain, we repair the injury and our spirit is able to comfortably sit back into our body, the flow of our life energy is restored, and we feel 'whole' again. That's what healing truly means: feeling whole.

Terms such as 'ascension' or 'raising your vibration' don't resonate with me at all, connecting my body to my spirit does. The journey or experience is not going up, away or anywhere else but back to my self, it's an appreciation and deep gratitude for my humanity that allows me to fully feel and embody my spirit.