Your Pain Is Your Treasure Map – How We Heal

What does our pain call us to heal within ourselves and how do we start the process? Some say that fear is a compass pointing you directly to what you need to do. Pain is like that as well. It points to exactly where we need to dive in and do the work of healing. We would do better to honor it for the purpose it serves rather than trying to run away from it. So if the work of our healing is as important as I discussed in the last post, how do we do it? Hopefully you had a chance to read the last blog post and want to know a little more about what spiritual, emotional, and mental healing looks like.

When you’re in despair and can’t see a way out of the chaos inside and outside of your life, how do you start the process of healing? First, I suggest you set an intention to understand what your pain has to offer you, what the life circumstances you’ve found yourself in have to show you about yourself. Ask what potential it has to transform you into who you were always meant to be. Because, remember that it’s a map leading you right to that place of your truth and your gifts. Then you can set out to heal whatever it is on an emotional, mental, and spiritual level. For me, all healing is ultimately a spiritual healing but for the sake of understanding it more concretely we’ll divide it up into these three major areas.

You can release yourself from each of the painful wounds you carry by connecting to them on a feeling level and processing them as I talked about in my Feel It To Heal It blog. When you do that you feel more space open up inside of you and things look vastly different from that vantage point. This is a clearing, an energetic release. Then you can mine those experiences and circumstances for the gifts they have brought, the lessons they have taught you, the parts of yourself they have caused you to bring forward. That’s where you will find the purpose in them, that’s where you will find that it has all actually been perfect in order to bring you to a new level of understanding and awareness. This is the shift in perception I was talking about. From this place, forgiveness becomes much easier to do. This is called emotional healing. One way I am working with this right now is through a process that my good friend, Soul Coach Teri Jo Wheeler, suggested for me. It’s a process of letter writing or conversations with someone I have really needed to heal with on an emotional level. I write the letters daily (I don’t share them with the person) and they reconnect me to all the feelings I had stuffed down but that have really driven a wedge in our relationship. The process not only creates a softening inside of me but opens up more space within and brings me insights that are very healing. As I continue the process, I notice the grace that is offered me because of my intention to heal this. I can see where the Divine takes over for me to get me to even deeper levels of healing and clearing. I can either complete the healing with this person on my own or I may get to a place where I want to have a conversation with them to complete it. I will let that reveal itself to me.

Inquire as to what pathological pattern  your pain is pointing out to be transformed? We repeat what our pain has taught us from an early age. Bring it to awareness and consider what lie it is pointing to that you continually tell yourself. I was locked in a pathological pattern of believing I was unlovable, unwanted and that men were people you didn’t question, only doing what they wanted out of fear of rejection or abuse. This was what I learned and I repeated this painful pattern over and over throughout my life until the day I finally saw it clearly, questioned its validity, created a new belief and have been putting into practice all that I’ve learned by taking action that is no longer in alignment with that pattern.  This is what I call mental healing.

Surrender your pain to a higher power and ask to be shown what you’re meant to do with it. Develop a relationship with the Divine through meditation and prayer. Ask how you can use your pain to live more in alignment with your true nature as a divine being, how you can use it to offer something to the world. Then listen because the answers are there in your intuitions and those things you feel called to do. I felt a very clear knowing as I was emerging out of my destructive pattern that I would be helping others do the same. This was the purpose because I had to go through it all to usher others through the same process. What your painful experiences bring forward from you are the capabilities that have been lying dormant. It’s been set up perfectly for you to do this because those qualities and capabilities are the ones you need in order to live the divine purpose of your life. When you seek spiritual healing, you are seeking to remember your wholeness, which has never been touched. It has all been divinely guided to bring you back to who and what you were always meant to be as well as to understand that your source of happiness, joy, abundance, love, etc  is the Divine within you, and not something worldly. When you really get this on a deep down level then this is what I call spiritual healing.

So, now the question is what will you do with your pain, your emotional wounds, your crappy life experiences? Will you use them as the road map they are, leading you right to your treasure trove of love, gifts and talents? Everyone is called to do this work, but not everyone heeds the call. The world needs you to listen deeply to your heart, get on the road, follow your map, and reach your destiny!

P.S.  I want to say that this is really an in a nutshell version of what healing is to me on all of these levels. There is way more than can truly be expounded on in one blog post. If you have questions or comments, I welcome them.