Responding from fear or from trust
There are things we control and others we don’t. As much as we take responsibility to create the favorable circumstances for health and harmony to occur, the body will get sick and we will live difficult situations at some point in life. This is simply part of life and the path of the soul. We do not come into this world to live only pleasant experiences, we come to live and experience everything, including disease and death.
What we can always choose is our response to what we are experiencing. Understood in that way, our ability to respond is the true meaning of “responsibility”.
Do we respond from fear, with resistance, fighting? Trying to get rid of what bothers us as soon as possible? Blaming something on the outside? Taking it personal, feeling like the victim, self-pitying, closing down and locking us into our pain, turning it into suffering? (Do not misunderstand, I am not saying that you have to resign, enter a passive state, not take action …, I mean the internal attitude towards your own body and life itself).
Or do we respond with acceptance, trust, openness, surrender …, knowing that there is a wisdom, a purpose even to this awkward situation; that it is a gift of love even if it doesn’t seem like it? Do we respond with curiosity and courage to explore how this consciously unwanted situation could be serving us on some unconscious level? Do we dare to open ourselves, allowing us to see, feel and become aware (and then own) even of our darkest, craziest, most irrational, but authentic desires?
We all experience challenging situations and we have all responded with fear and resistance, and that’s ok. It is part of the process too … it is in fact necessary in order to realize that this response does not usually lead to fullness. So it is not bad nor am I judging you. And at the same time, if you do not want to be constantly suffering, regardless of what is happening to you, know that you have a choice.
Because the only important question is: are you happy or are you not?
Trust what is = Feel less
When I say that you have the choice to respond from fear or from trust when something bothers you, there are (at least) two ways to understand this.
The first is to use your mental strength to put your focus somewhere else, to use positive affirmations or visualizations, gratitude lists, etc. to help you change a feeling of heaviness into a lighter one.
You may talk to yourself (or others) in a way like: “Come on. Stop feeling pity for yourself, it makes no sense, there are so many good things in your life, and everything is perfect as it is.”
And sometimes doing that can indeed be the appropriate response when we are in a state of stagnation, of mental rumination, of suffering.
But it also has its risks, in particular of denying / by-passing a pain, a feeling, a belief, a need, an unconscious desire. We might want to jump in one go to trust (or forgiveness, or joy), when our physical and emotional reality is another.
And it is precisely for this reason that sooner or later we will find ourselves again in the same situation, because the painful knot is still there and will be activated again, resonating with something on the outside.
In these cases that we do not really feel in the body what we say with the mind, the second way of understanding the invitation to trust may be more useful.
Trust what is = Feel more
The second way of understanding the invitation to trust is to fully trust the wisdom of what is – whatever it is you are experiencing – to trust even in your inability to feel trust, peace or deep joy at this time.
If something keeps spinning and spinning inside of you, you know that you have collided with some energetic (and/or physical) knot of pain, some construct of emotions, desires, needs and narratives that live in you, possibly for a long time already, and right now you have an opportunity to resolve it a little.
Instead of using effort (energy) to resist that heaviness that is pulling you down, using the power of your mind to change your feeling-reality and lifting your mood, you do the opposite: you relax, soften, and let the current take you more deeply into what bothers and hurts you.
You speak to yourself (or others) in a way like: “Honey, I see that there is something there that hurts you, something that makes you contract and close, something that does not let you find peace. I know you are afraid to enter there, but here I am, I hold you, you are not alone.”
And then you take time to dive in there without holding back, without fear, without restrictions, in your own particular way.
Personally, when I realize that some painful knot got activated inside of me, it’s not enough for me to only observe the sensations, I need to give movement to this stagnant energy so that it really is released and can be transformed.
I use my mind to consciously relax my resistances and physical defenses (which the autonomic nervous system activates to protect me). Gently, I open spaces that feel closed in me, using my breath, body movement and voice.
According to what the circumstances of the moment allow, this can happen in a subtle or more expressive way but whenever I notice something very important, I find myself a safe space where I can give it total and unrestricted expression. I amplify my pain; I allow myself to self-pity and even curse others or the universe, but in a conscious way, and for a limited time, in order to access the core of pain, to see and feel it in all its nuances.
There comes a moment in which I am no longer “doing”, but that the pain itself takes the reins, while I continue observing, listening and holding myself, allowing everything that lives in me to come to light, welcoming it without judgment (afterwards I can analyze and question it). At some point there will be an energy discharge, a scream or intense cry that comes from the deepest part of my being and is usually relatively short. It is like an orgasm and in fact it can be quite pleasant.
After this stagnant energy is mobilized, there is a space freed up within me – and without any effort on my part I can feel again true peace, trust, joy, gratitude, forgiveness in all my cells.
Trusting both from my Divinity and my Humanity
Trust, peace, joy, forgiveness … cannot be forced nor reached by jumping over the pain and discomfort (at least not in a lasting way). Rather, they are gradually cultivated by crossing the valley of pain with consciousness and presence step by step, beginning to open ourselves to “small” pains, just outside our comfort zone, but not too far, and when we verify that nothing happens, we open a bit more and the more we open, the more space there is for love and joy to flow without even trying.
But we have to actually walk the path, we can’t jump over any step. Sometimes we want to go faster and we venture too far out, and then it seems that we move backwards, but we also learn from that. Nothing is ever a mistake.
The vision of total trust that no longer feels any resistance or fear can coexist with trusting the emotions that our human reality implies. If we can accept that we are both Divine and Human, we can, one the one hand, trust that everything always happens for a reason and is perfectly fine as it is, while, on the other hand, we can also trust our emotional reality, including those parts of us that are still unable to fully trust. We can release the idea that total trust equals to some state of permanent “non-emotion”, of no longer feeling anything (which would basically mean we are dead). This allows us to lose the fear and resistance to feeling our emotions (our Life energy moving through us !) fully.
By attending to emotions in this way, we are actually building more and more trust, both in ourselves and our ability to sustain ourselves even in very deep pain, and in Life itself. Step by step, our response even to challenging situations will change, without having to make any effort, simply because there are less and less knots of pain stuck inside of us that enter into resonance with outside triggers.
And if we fall back into contraction, indicating a loss of trust (although we mentally continue to know what we can trust), there is no self-judgment. We trust even our suffering because we have discovered that everything that happens can help us free ourselves a little bit more of unprocessed old pains, stories, narratives and movies that are not true … and also to open a little more to the pain stemming from unfulfilled needs or desires – allowing them to move and take us where we have to go …
Trusting what it is … both your current life experience and what you feel with respect to it. The more this trust becomes unwavering, unshakable, the more you will experience peace and joy as a result. Trust allows us to respond and act but from a place of openness and relaxation that in itself heals us, although the body may still be sick at times.
