Make peace with your pain

As I felt the dull ache at the pit of my stomach I realised: "this pain is also just an aspect of life".

Instead of moving away from the pain and tightening up so I didn’t have to feel it as much, I decided to move towards it. Instead of saying NO, like I usually would, I said YES. That’s when it all made sense. I’d been habitually denying that this pain was an aspect of my reality. I thought that everything else was reality, but this pain wasn’t included in that. Just as when we’re deeply in love or heartbroken we start to understand the meaning of song lyrics that we’ve heard 1,000 times before, I started to understand statements of wisdom I’d heard.

If we resist something, we are: 1. empowering it 2. Telling ourselves that it isn’t aspect of our reality If you want to love yourself, it can’t just be the ecstasy and joy… it has to be the pain too. If you want to say YES to life, it can’t just be to happiness and good times - it needs to be to everything. When we say NO to one piece of ourselves, we’re saying NO to the whole. When I started confronting my pain, I realised that focussed meditation is applied shadow-work. It is a direct means to access your unconscious, and get in touch with those pieces of yourself that usually remain hidden… and it gives you a way to handle them. What happened when I started loving the pain in my heart?

I was no longer afraid. I was no longer anxious. It turned into a ball of light and ecstasy that exploded through my body and took me on a journey into the psychedelic.