Stop Hoarding Pain

Permission happens in layers. Which layer do you need to give yourself permission to move through?

I posted that the other day on social media and thought I would use this blog to expand on it just a bit more.

The idea is pretty simple - don't pick up the pain of other people - the reality is a whole different ball of yarn. We have a tendency to dive into the pain of the people around us that we care about. We also have at tendency to pick up the pain of the people we don't care about when we get offended by what they say or do.

Anytime anybody does something mean or cruel they are doing so from pain. That means that if you get offended or bothered by them in some way, you are in fact picking up that pain and then potentially projecting your own pain depending on how you respond. You are taking on what they are projecting and you're doing so willingly.

Wait! What?!

Let's back up for a second.

Picking up pain isn't just about misery loving company. It isn't just about joining your friends and family in being upset about whatever happened. It isn't just about crying with your best friend after they get dumped. It's not just that kind of pain. There is a lot of other pain that gets tossed around that we don't think of this way.

When somebody insults you, that's pain.

When somebody cuts you off in traffic, that's pain.

When somebody blocks you on social media, that's pain.

When people respond badly to something going on around them, that's also pain.

When we learn to see life this way and we realize that pain is actually everywhere all the time, we can begin to change how we see what's happening.

The ego immediately wants to get offended. That's its' job and it's supposed to do that because it wants to protect you. This is a defense mechanism that every single one of us has. It is born out of a fear of pain. The ego is afraid of being hurt and will therefore do anything and everything to make sure it doesn't have to take on anymore pain than it already has. While there is a purpose to this defense mechanism, it often causes more problems than it solves.

If somebody throws a snowball at you and you don't want to engage in a snowball fight, throwing a snowball back is not going to achieve your desired goal. The only way to stay out of a snowball fight is to say you're not playing and walk away. The ego would have you throw a snowball back though, because the ego wants to defend you.

The snowball is the pain that people throw around. Somebody calls you stupid and you tell them to....fill in the blank. Now two snowballs have been thrown and now you have a snowball fight brewing. If you can give yourself a moment to breathe, recognize that the insult is a snowball, then you have the ability to resist the urge to throw pain back.

Whether you can do this successfully or not, there is another step to take later on. It is important that you sit down with yourself and question your own reaction or response regardless of how good or bad it was. Why did you react or respond the way you did? Was there any pain on your part? Where did that pain come from? And how can you heal the wound or button that may have been triggered?

If you want to change your responses and reactions to the things that go on around you, you have to be willing to question your own behavior. You have to be willing to be aware of yourself within the experience. This is what being aware of yourself looks like.

Now, when we're talking about compassion and empathy, what we're trying to avoid is being upset ourselves. We're trying to learn to create an energetic boundary that allows us to stay out of the emotion of the situation that we are in. It's not that we don't acknowledge it, we just don't jump into it.

Compassion and empathy do not require us to be upset ourselves. As I sometimes like to say, compassion and empathy do not require us to jump in the mud puddle of pain that the people around us are in.

I love my tow truck analogy for this idea because this is exactly what it means. The tow truck is not helpful to you if it gets stuck too. When you come to the aid of a friend or family member that is experiencing pain, you will better serve them if you can stay in your power. Your power comes from being able to stay out of the mud or the pain, just like the tow truck's power comes from not being stuck as well.

Your power and wisdom are only available to you when you're not in pain or when you're not crying your eyeballs out with your friends and family. Your wisdom and intuition work best when you can stay level. The best nuggets of wisdom will come through you when you stay out of the pain of other people.

Is that easy? Nope.

It's really hard to stay level when you're surrounded by intense emotion. Why is it so difficult? It's actually not because you love them. It's because their pain is not triggering you. You don't recognize it as a trigger because you're not offended by it. You see the only difference between the person that called you stupid and your best friend's broken heart is that one offended you and the other one didn't. Both are actually people offering pain in different ways. The only difference is your interpretation of what's happening.

Your ego didn't need to defend you from your friend's broken heart, so instead it encouraged you to jump in with them and it brought up the pain of your last broken heart to do it. It recognized the pain as something it had experienced and it essentially joined in.

The ego is doing what it knows. It's not bad. It's not trying to hurt you. We're not here to transcend the ego at all. The idea is that we learn to work with the ego. Working with the ego requires us to understand it. When we understand it, then we can begin to consciously change how much we allow our ego to determine our behavior.

Responding and reacting from the ego is a choice. We don't have to do it, we do it because we've been taught that this is what being human means. That's actually where the lie is. There is no reason to respond from your ego every single time. Most of the time, you'll find your ego gets you into trouble more than it helps you. They aren't yet taking responsibility for their own behavior.

When you recognize what the ego is doing, you can calm the ego down. You can gain control or get a grip, as it were. The ego runs wild because we let it. We've been taught that the ego is who we are. While our personality is shaped by our ego, our ego should not be determining our behavior for us. Our behavior is a choice and we have to learn to make that a conscious choice so that it's something we have control over.

When pain is offered by other people we have the opportunity to make a choice around how to respond or react every single time.

The broken heart is actually no different than the insult; both are pain being projected out into the world. They are both triggering you because one makes you cry (that's a trigger) and the other makes you mad (that's also a trigger). The only difference in your response is that the insult that makes you feel the need to defend yourself. If you stopped defending yourself you'd respond the same way to the insult as you do to your friend's broken heart.

That's a high bar isn't it?

As with everything that I talk about, these are lofty goals that we can continually work towards. We're not here to be perfect. We're here to have these experiences; that's the point of being human.

I'm sharing new ways of looking at things because of the level of pain that so many of us are in. If we can learn to see things a little bit differently and check ourselves more often, we can begin to heal some of this stuff.

It just takes a few of us to stop responding so automatically and unconsciously to everything and actually start paying attention to ourselves, to begin to create change and healing in the world.

The goal is to heal so we can feel better. The reason most of us start on this journey is because of pain. Well, what if you started to see your past and present experiences this way? What would that change for you?

There is a better way forward. Learning to see ourselves and our experiences a little differently is one of the ways we can make the path easier for ourselves.

Love to all.

Della