The Voice of Pain……….

On New Year's Day we took our nine year old daughter ice skating. She was excited. I wasn't. I didn't really want to go. See, I had been feeling very sad for a long time. I couldn't seems to piece much of anything together with a real truth, just a lot of emotions. There was anger, lots of it, sadness and just a feeling of being overwhelmed with not being able to make any sense of all of the feelings for so long. I would hear one feeling and be so sure of what it was saying. I would respond and realize that I was swirling just as much in all of the emotions as I was before. I couldn't seem to find my way out. I wanted to take action, make choices that would leave me feeling "Yah, that is what I wanted to say and that is just what I wanted to do!!", but I would look at what I was telling myself and I realized I was stuck, stuck in some beliefs that were leaving me feeling like there was no way out. Damned if I did, damned if I didn't and I couldn't see anything but those two options. So, there I was, I just wanted to lay down and stop, stop trying, stop feeling, stop wanting, stop grieving, just stop, but instead we went skating. I think it is funny how much we don't about karma, not sure if that is the right word, but why things happen that happen. I wonder if something is beckoning that we just need some help to understand. Well, that day, something was beckoning me. I am not a great skater, but I don't usually fall, unless I am being reckless and I can see that coming a mile a way. This day I was not being reckless and I did not see this coming. Out of the blue, I completely lost my balance, one of those great wipe outs, feet out from under you and as hard as you can fall on your back. There I was, laying on the ice, thinking that really hurt, reliving the slow motion of trying to catch myself with my right hand outstretched in an awkward twist and then coming down in it. I felt somewhat shocked, my skate in my lower leg, my wrist throbbing and generally the wind knocked out of me. Whhhheeww, I laid on the cold ice catching my breath. That was it, no more chances the skates were coming off. In my family we call it boot skating, when you are too chicken to skate with real skates, so that was my plan. I didn't really make it back on the ice. I was shaking, in shock and not really feeling any pain for about an hour, when my wrist started to swell. I figured it was probably broken, turned out not to be, but badly sprained. Either way there was lots of swelling, lots of pain and complete impairment of my ability to use my right hand. I am right handed. The irony was not lost on me. I have been studying and trying to understand what my state of mind means and where it might be leading me too. Throughout my life pain has been a call that caused me to stop and listen. For some reason when I am in pain, I can no longer listen to the competing voices of my intellect trying to break down, analyze and come up with the most efficient and effective solution to the problem at hand. I spend far too much time without listening trying to hear and pain helps my shut out all the noise of my own head. I makes me shut up and finally hear the gut and core of my being and what it is telling me and has known all along, but I was too busy spinning things around and around and trying to create what would be the most perfect solution that would never go wrong. I was looking for results, needing results and living for results. I was afraid to get it wrong, afraid, I would be a failure, afraid that I really wouldn't be enough, and worst of all afraid to be honest about being afraid. It is what I believed and maybe if I tried hard enough, maybe just maybe if I analyzed it deeper and looked harder I could finally make the choice that would tell me that this time I was enough. This time the message was different. IT was that both ways were wrong, staying and running. If I stayed I had learned to stay without being heard or being present. I stayed and sacrificed who I was for others, if I left I hadn't sacrificed myself, but I had nothing. I was alone. In my pain I saw another option, one I had never seen before, what if I stayed, and called what worked for me, what if I set some boundaries about what I could do or be? What if I as a person had a voice about my own experience? No wonder the feelings, no wonder the sadness the anger, driven by a belief of my lack of self I had no ability to see what a circumstance might look and feel like with my voice holding what it needed and what It was ready for. Powerful idea, and as I stepped I realized that my pain had helped me to break down the barriers and finally be able to see there was more than what I could have perceived in my belief driven intellect. Right at the core of my being, I knew that I needed to be present and not run away and I knew that I needed to speak, popular or not what I had to say, Without the constant analyzing voices. My acupuncturist told me that her perception of what my body was telling her was a yin deficiency, a deficiency of the female receptive principle. I couldn't receive myself, I couldn't trust my intuition and it was challenging my physically. When I sat in her office and listened I realized, a culminating experience of study, experience and pain, what was really in this place. I finally could see past my own intellectual swirling, my excess of yang and the masculine principles trying to drive my life, but losing ground every so effectively, until this moment. I heard the other part and knew that in order to heal, both physically, emotionally and spiritually I had to turn and listen, listen to the sound of crying muscles, disconnected joints and a broken heart. They brought the sound of change. They knew what my mind could not grasp, when I started to listen, my pain finally told me the truth my heart had been whispering and I knew that I could finally find my way home. My compass, pain.