The only way out is through. You have to feel it, to heal it. Dr. Barry Weinberg
Emotional Pain
We may only feel our physical pains. Emotional pain can lurk behind your physical agony. In my experience as a healer, emotional causes underlie most physical pain.
Robert Frost in the poem A Servant to Servants says, The best way out is always through. In the poem he refers to the only way out of struggle is through it.
In the Western, world we have been conditioned to avoid and suppress our pain, including emotional pain. On an energetic level this pain always festers inside us. It raises it’s head ever so often or sometimes quit often to let us know it still lives within us.
In this article, I suggest the only permanent way out of suffering means being present with and going through your physical and emotional pain.
Lana received a Bowen therapy healing session for physical discomfort above her left hip in the lower back. The pain subjectively registered eight out of ten in severity on the pain scale.
Lana said, I realized I needed to experience and hold steady with the pain rather than going back and forth avoiding it.
Of course we resist pain. It hurts. Then, however, we inflict our emotional pain on others through anger or we repress the pain and take it out on ourselves through self-loathing, anger turned inward, or physical disease.
If you have physical or emotional pain and have no access to a professional healer, have a person sit with you and hold the energy while you go directly into the core of the pain. Your support person needs to sit with a compassionate heart with no emotional reaction or desire to “fix” anything. Breathing into the pain and releasing it on the out breathe also helps.
If the support person gets triggered emotionally, they need to contain their emotions. This means resisting the urge to reach out to fix the other person because they feel their own discomfort. The support person contains the discomfort and sits with it in the moment with sustained attention as they also continue to hold the energy for the other person.
I, however, suggest you find a professional healer if you have someone available.
I chose to experience the pain and go through it, said Lana. I recognized the emotional pain of being separate from God. I relived my childhood and witnessed the pain in my family that I had resisted. As a child I shut down for I could not live with the unbearable pain. Now as I entered into the core of the pain, it energetically traveled from my sciatica, through my heart chakra. Once all the pain dissolved in the heart, it traveled into my head. I have had agonizing migraines for over thirty-five years.
Oh, my God, Lana cried out in agony, It is all my families’ pain. I am experiencing every pain I have ever resisted.
Later, Lana looked up into the heights as if from a great cavern in her head. I am totally empty in my body. The pain no longer hurts. Lana realized, I can experience others emotional pain without encountering the resistance of my own pain.
Unlike Lana we may only experience our own physical pains. Lana also felt the emotional pain behind her physical agony. In my experience as a healer, usually emotional causes and emotional pain underlie physical pain.
Are you willing to practice becoming more aware, stay present, and go through the physical pain and emotional pain?
Warning: In cases of severe physical pain, I advise you consult the appropriate medical practitioner.
Tips for Staying Present & Going Through Emotional Pain:
- Practice a Buddhist Mindfulness Method – Focus on your breath and when your mind wanders come back to your breath. This helps bringing yourself back to the present moment. Keep coming back, that is the practice.
- Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, teaches about being in the present moment. Being present with our pain means learning to stay in the now rather than the past or future. When there is no way out, there is still always a way through. Eckhart Tolle
- Eugene Gendlin, Focusing, teaches a six step method to staying present with any sensation in our body, which also includes vague feelings. Staying present with the sensations without any desire to fix something, allows the sensations to open and change on their own.
Sitting Together in Presence Meditation – Tolle https://youtu.be/hyvZ0XRAEcA
About the Author
Michael David Lawrience is the author of Emotional Health: The Secret from Drama, Trauma, and Pain His book provides ways for improving emotional health, easing pain and stress, healing physical and emotional abuse, and spiritual awakening. https://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Health-Secret-Freedom-Trauma/dp/0615479170
Michael as a Residential and Self-Esteem Coach and Mentor has over 15 years’ experience teaching teen’s self-awareness, self-esteem, and self-reliance. See eBook Self Esteem- A Teen’s Guide for Girls https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009L4JLMO
Michael offers Bowen Therapy in person in Sedona, Arizona for easing physical and emotional pain and for spiritual growth. https://www.emotionalhealthtips.com/bowen-therapy-sedona/
Michael also conducts personalized hiking tours in Sedona for emotional and spiritual breakthroughs.
