Emotional Transformation
The origin of our pain lies in the moments we forgot who we are. We shift from the moment we arrived in this body, knowing the answer “I am”, to a time when all we can answer is “I am not”. Our human experience of “I am” is mostly as “I am Love”. Our human experience of “I am not” is mostly “I am Unloveable”. Or “I don’t matter”, or “I am nothing”. At our core is a sense of emptiness. Yet these are not an answer of what I am, but rather what I am not. And out of this place of not knowing comes a slew of beliefs about ourselves that are painful, and continue to lead us into creating more painful experiences, solidifying our beliefs.
We forget who we are in moments when we have an experience where our Joy of Being gets tangled or overwhelmed by another person’s pain or our own. Our culture, especially when we are young, has no way to clear this up, and we get stuck: The new experience of pain becomes our identity. On top of this experience, we build up a whole set of beliefs which prevent us from living the life we want.
When we are in pain, wandering around in the dark, almost everything that happens pushes us further into the dark. Even love when it comes to us can push us further into the dark: Our distrust of love may heighten our sense of unworthiness and loneliness. Sleepwalking is a hard place to be, and hard to get out of. But anyone who is reading this is already moving, already heading out of the darkness.
What is most important to understand about the origin of our pain is this:
We are transformed by experience.
This may seem obvious. Yet its power is that it gives us the key to escape from our pain.
How We Heal
The way we heal is simple: we experience the truth of who we are. We experience ourselves as love. We remember the Joy that we are. In that moment of truth, our heart opens. We easily answer the question “Who are you?” with “I am!”. I am love, light, beautiful, magical, powerful, perfect, and on and on. Getting to the moment of truth is the challenging part of transformation.
The path to the moment of truth is a journey. It requires a guide who knows and can see the truth of you, beyond what you can see of you. The guide must know that there is a way out, a way back to you, with an unflagging certainty that you truly are love. And that if you dig deep enough, you will see not that you are nothing, but that you are everything you imagined you are, but haven’t felt in a very, very long time. What gets in the way of our healing is our deepest fear that the emptiness at our core may be all there is. We may have built a life designed to not look into our own darkness. To heal requires a strong and loving guide to hold a space for you to move through the darkness, to find that moment of truth, when you re-experience yourself without all the old pain and beliefs.
The key to transformation is this:
We are transformed by experience.
What this means is that it does little to talk about our experiences, and try to gain an understanding of how we got to be who we are. We don’t heal because it helps very little to heal our wounds by knowing what they are. Or even knowing that we made up some belief about ourselves arising from our wound. Knowing the story of ourselves and why we are the way we are does not transform us. It may allow us to manage ourselves, so we restrain and refrain from acting on our beliefs, because we think they are incorrect, so we decide to choose something different. Making choices is a good step towards creating the life we want. However, there is still a need to restrain and refrain. Having to restrain and refrain constantly is a tough way to live. It may create better outcomes, but it is exhausting. And inside the pain is still there. We cannot think our way out of our wounds. We can only manage our wounds by thinking about them.
Transformative experiences happen when we are fully in our bodies, meaning we are open to all that we feel, emotionally and physically. If we follow our feelings, they will take us to the places we forgot who we are¾the places we got hurt in life. We can become so present to these feelings and sensations that we are present in our lives in a place and time in our past. We are finally living fully in the place we are always living anyway. That is, when we experience a painful moment, we leave ourselves there, and we watch this moment from that place, and try to control this moment to get ourselves out of of some old place. And it never works, so we think about the next moment, and we are never here in this moment. To transform is to be back in those moments so fully that we can re-experience ourselves in the truth of who we are¾which of course, is Love.
We may not always be stuck back in time, but may be stuck in a relationship of whose existence which we are not conscious. This may be anyone we have been (or are) close to. We may be living as if we are with them, usually carrying their pain. When we open to how we are truly being, a path to letting go always unfolds. We move through it with our whole body and spirit, and afterwards an understanding emerges. Understanding does not lead to transformation. Rather, understanding and insight follow the transformational moment of experiencing the truth of who you are.
Key Experiences in Transformation
There are many essential experiences that we can have that are transformative, leading us back to the fullness of ourselves. Discovering our power in situations where we lost it, releasing our sadness from those to whom we have held on, or seeing our perfection in moments when we felt ashamed, to name just a few. The most central experience we can have is seeing our parents clearly, in all their pain and their love. If we can truly see them, then our judgments of them, and our anger, drop away. We don’t just say “I know they did the best they could”. Instead, we get how what they did arose out of all of their love and their pain, and they could do no more and no less. When we experience their struggle, not just think about it, we truly have compassion for them. And instead of being angry, we just want to cry, and reach out to them. And when our judgments of our parents falls away, we stop judging ourselves. When we see the love that they are, we know that they truly loved us, and that we are love too. To answer the question “Who am I?”, we must first be able to answer the question “Who are my parents?”. Our parents are the source of us, and the key to finding ourselves.
Everyone is truly Love. Our parents may be the most challenging people to see it in. But that is the key: once we have seen it in them, and can unconditionally love our parents, then we can unconditionally love ourselves, for we are them. And then everyone in the world, for we are them too. All parents love their children. All of them. It is themselves they don’t love, not us. That is our greatest confusion, and channel through which we inherit our pain. The cycle of generations passing down their pain ends by healing our parents first in our own hearts and eyes.