Path of the Healer

In my experience, the solution to pain is the same as the solution to separation from God. It is complete and absolute surrender. In fact, the two paths may lead to the same end. For most of us, surrender to the Divine is simply not practical or possible, since we really don’t know the object of our devotion well enough to surrender thereto. Pain, on the other hand, is perfectly familiar to most of us, in one form or another, be it spiritual, mental, emotional, or physical in nature, or a combination thereof.

Further, it is my experience that, by surrendering to pain, we actually accomplish the goal of oneness with Spirit in a way that few other paths offer with such certainty. Here’s how I’ve come to see it:

Pain, while commanding huge amounts of attention, is limited and mortal. There is an end to it, even if that end arises from the death of that which experiences it, which can only happen to the body, the mind, or the emotions which are feeling it. Happily, our truest essence, which by nature is infinite spiritual awareness, is not limited or mortal. So by meeting pain with attention, attention can always grow to become larger than the pain – so large, in fact, that the pain ultimately becomes unnoticeable to the point of nonexistence. Meanwhile, growing awareness moves us closer and closer to eventual identity with that awareness which shines like the sun unto all things great and small, evil and good, selfish or selfless…

This has been my path: To take the time to focus on whatever pain presents itself on whatever level in which it exists, and to then become unrelenting in identifying with and existing as that pain, breathing my awareness into it and breathing it into my awareness, until the boundaries between myself and the pain disappear. In this way the pain becomes embodied in me fully and expresses itself through me, and I become identified with this pain to the point of understanding its origins and purposes, its beginnings and its ends…

In the process of identifying with it, the pain may grow stronger, larger, taking up more space and attention, and yet this very expansion triggers the continued birth and growth of something within me: the attention necessary to quell its endless hunger. In that process, some limited aspect of my attention may have to die – some limited and limiting identity which served a useful purpose at some time, but which now impedes the continued growth of free (available) attention needed to address the present crisis. And eventually, the outcome is always the same. At some point the expansion of the pain into me and the expansion of my attention into the pain result in the two becoming one. In that instant, the pain is instantly gone and the flow of freed energy and informed awareness flood through me in a euphoric flood of sweet understanding, and I have become something I never was before, consciously, or always was before, unconsciously – a happy collection of expanded awareness whose only agenda is more peace, love, and beauty.

I should add that, in the long run, the pain we so heroically embrace is none other than a significant part of ourselves which at some point became ignored and then abandoned as undesirable. Welcoming them home as our own creations is only fitting, since that's where most of them come from. Recognizing this to begin with is not necessary, however, What is required is to recognize that, wherever it appears to have come from, the pain is now within us, and can only be dealt with therein. It is our creation NOW even if we deny authorship of it in its very beginnings. And by owning it thus in the present, we become both its creator in the past and its discreator in our future.