Are you attached to your pain? An easy way to heal.

To find yourself, you must be prepared to lose yourself.

“I can’t stop thinking. I keep going over the old wounds, the guilt, the shame over and over again. I just can’t control my mind.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Well, don’t you say that processing the past is the way to let go of it? Every therapist I go to makes me recollect everything in detail. And now I just feel stuck. Like there is no answer. Like this process of healing seems endless.”

“The process of healing isn't endless. The process of learning is. Processing the past is important, but there is also this phase where we remember, just out of habit. It doesn’t lead anywhere. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Yes, I think I agree. It's like I am going in circles, and there is no end to it. Why do you think that happens?”

“I think it’s probably because we get attached to the pain. We take pain as an identity. When I am attached to my pain, the memory of pain, even if it hurts me, also comforts me. I like going to that place over and over again, and reliving it.”

“How to stop this rumination of the past?”

Constant thinking is like taking a rake into a newly planted garden. You keep turning over the soil and nothing will ever grow, but leave the garden alone for a week and you will see that the seeds you planted have sprouted.

The garden needs time to grow.

The same is with a wounded animal. The animal needs care, rest to recover. If they constantly lick the wound the wound remains open. But learn to leave it alone, and it heals.

This indirect way of healing is powerful.

It requires total self-forgetfulness. 

It requires that you occasionally don't remember who you are. That you lose access to all the hurt, and the fears, and the unfulfilled desires.

That you go away on a vacation, not outside, but inside your own mind, where you can be free to explore and experience a new side of you.

Most of us believe in taking literal vacations to recover. We want to travel the world, this or that.

Yet that isn't recovery at all, because you take your emotions and pain wherever you go. You will only find there what you take with you.

Our vacations are mostly an escape, not a true disconnection from our past.

The way to forget oneself then is to find ways to get your mind involved, engaged, focused without forcing it in any manner.

It is to find a natural, deep state of flow in an activity. Such an activity can be called a drift, for it is already happening within you. 

It wants to happen, in the same way that a stream wants to come down the mountainside.

Gravity does the work, so what do you gravitate towards?

What do you feel called to do? What is your drift?

What wants to happen through you?

Perhaps you have always wanted to play the piano, learn a language, practice a skill like woodworking, or painting, or dancing, or martial arts?

Do it. Don't waste anymore time waiting for the perfect day to begin.

In refusing to do what you naturally love, you are refusing to fulfill your true potential.

Enter the drift. Become a nobody.

Transcend your identity and become something larger than yourself.

This is why whatever you create from the drift, in the future, whether it's music, art, or writing, does not belong to you either. You simply were a vessel through which it entered this world.

When you are in your drift, you also transcend time. You become untethered from your past, and your future. You enter the timeless flow of the present.

Why you Heal

When you forget yourself in this way, you leave the garden alone. You are letting it regrow. 

You are letting it heal. This kind of self-forgetfulness builds self-knowing. For each time you return to who you are, the person you come back to has slightly changed.

Like a flower that blooms when no one watches, you have transitioned into the next phase of your life.

This ability to find happiness on our own, without depending on someone else, without waiting for them to change, builds true self-worth.

It teaches you that the happiness that you want, does not require another human being. You have its source within you.

When you are connected with yourself, you can now safely connect with someone else.

To find yourself is to lose yourself, in the sacred practice of something you love. 

Meditation Minute : Your Weekly Practice

This week, try this simple meditation. 

Visualize a beautiful lotus 🪷  centered in your belly.

Whenever you find yourself afraid or angry, close your eyes and imagine this flower slowly open up, and release a soft pink and white glow, make the lotus as exquisite as your imagination permits.

Now breathe. 

Place both hands at the center of your chest, on top of each other, press slightly inward, and say to yourself, "I will always be safe in here."