Latest / Infinitely Precious / Inhabiting Pain

Transcript

Inhabiting Pain · Infinitely Precious

• 0:00
  Intro: Welcome to the Infinitely Precious podcast produced by Infinitely Precious LLC. Your host is James Henry. Remember, you are infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you already are.
• 0:11
  James: Hello, beloved. It's me, James, and it's an opportunity for us to be together again for another episode of the Infinitely Precious podcast to be companions together. Today is the one hundredth episode of the Infinitely Precious podcast. If you have been with me from the very beginning, if you have been together on this podcast since the beginning, I give you thanks for being on that journey with me. If you are new, this is your first episode.
• 0:42
  Thanks for joining me now. The archives are there if you'd want to listen back to them. It's your call. But thanks very much for joining, for sharing the podcast with others so that they too can find this hopefully positive word that we put out into the world together on this journey, this infinitely precious journey. You'll remember that having finished the ripening series, that process series where we talked about the nine dimensions, there could be more, could be less, you identify them for yourself.
• 1:19
  Processes of ripening, of moving toward and away from the kinds of dimensions that inform a life in which we live. I moved on from the ripening series into what I'm calling the inhabiting series. I don't know how many there will be of the inhabiting series. The first week we talked about learning to inhabit just the belief that we are infinitely precious. Because for many of us that doesn't ring true inside of us.
• 1:50
  There's a part of us that believes something else. The second week, we took a look at inhabiting these bodies. These are these wonderful bodies that we inhabit become a way of sensing and being a part of our spiritual life because they are the way in which we engage the world in which we live. This week, I'd like to invite us to a little bit more difficult topic and that topic is inhabiting our struggles, inhabiting our pain. I don't know about you, but if you're anything like me, pain comes along and I look for a way to anesthetize myself or to run away, to avoid the pain at all costs.
• 2:33
  As an Enneagram type seven, pain is the place I'm always afraid I'm going to get stuck. So I find ways to distract my mind from being in that place of pain and struggle. That is my propensity when I'm in my most unhealthy moments. However, I have discovered over the last decade, slowly and surely, wouldn't have been called inhabiting if I had talked about it ten years ago, but the word inhabiting seems right, That I've learned over these last ten years that I don't have to the type doesn't define me. It just helps me understand some aspects of the way that I cope with being alive.
• 3:21
  It's not the key to all things, but it is perhaps a glimpse, a window into understanding myself. And that running away from the pain doesn't ultimately help me move through the pain. So when I invite you to inhabit the pain and the struggles in your life as they arise, what I'm inviting you to do is to be present to them. It's going to be hard. It's one thing to try to inhabit your body, another thing to try to inhabit a phrase that you've heard me say depending upon how many times you've listened to me a lot or maybe a very little.
• 4:07
  Learning to inhabit pain is to overcome the desire to get out of it. Because whatever the pain, there's a part of it that's telling our brain that we need to survive and to survive, we need to run away from this pain. We need to avoid it at all costs. That this pain is threatening to our very survival. And some kinds of pain really are.
• 4:35
  That's your body telling you, you need to go to the ER. Some kinds of emotional pain and spiritual pain and struggle are telling you that you need to seek someone who will help you on this journey. The pain is there to tell us that something is wrong And it's a something that needs to be addressed. I'm talking about the kinds of pain that we come in because we become disappointed with ourselves or disillusioned with the world we live in or because we've just watched one more news program that talks about the genocide in our world in various locations, ongoing wars, and we feel heavy and worn and that pain becomes internalized for us. Sometimes it's not always a personalized pain.
• 5:34
  It's simply a pain that we are carrying. And rather than rush through it or run away from it, we're invited to sit with it. Now I have to tell you, I can feel it in my body when I sit in pain, When I sit in the midst of a struggle, I can feel the desire to get up and go somewhere else, anywhere else, anywhere where there's not this pain, this struggle that I'm in. But the truth is when I'm feeling pain or struggle, I may physically feel like somewhere inside my instinct may say, get up and run away because it'll go away. Most of the time, the kinds of pain I'm feeling at that point, usually not physical pain, is going to go with me where it is.
• 6:22
  Until I find a way through that pain to enter truly into it and understand more about its origin story, where is it coming from? Why is it arising? How can I constructively learn something from this pain? What can it teach me? Now, if you're already in the midst of pain or struggle and you are hearing this podcast, you are not interested in hearing me say that.
• 6:48
  Oh, you can learn something from this. Isn't it wonderful to be in pain? And please don't hear me saying that I am not saying it is wonderful to be in pain. I'm saying that when pain comes, there may be something we can learn from it that can teach us how strong we really already are, how resilient we are in this world. We may have imagined we weren't.
• 7:21
  The greatest test of our strength is when we have to actually use the strength and rise to the moment we find ourselves in. Pain sometimes blinds us to the very resources we have to bear in a given moment. When we're in pain, all we want to do is relieve the pain. But to be human, to be fully ourselves sometimes invites us to sit with the pain, with the struggle, and ask of it what is the best course at this point. And sometimes this is a time to involve someone else you trust in your life, a significant other, a friend, someone who will sit with you in the midst of your pain.
• 8:07
  Because perhaps this is such a big emotional pain or a struggle that you are facing that you need someone more even than your friend, even than your significant other. It may invite you to go and see a therapist or to seek out a coach to help you work through the challenges that you're facing. Those are very real possibilities but any of those are not going to let you rush through it. As you learn to tell the story in the midst of pain, what brought you to that place? As you learn to tell the story of the struggle you are facing, you learn to find ways to understand the origins of that story and of who you are and why it's a challenge to face this pain, this challenge in your life, this struggle.
• 9:07
  Where did it come from? What does it say about who you are that you're struggling with this particular thing or that you're pained by this particular item? I mean, some pains are just the pains that we all share in common. We are all walking together with others in this world to a person who is also at some point struggled with pain and who may be struggling with pain in the very moment that you're walking with them. Pain has become for me an opportunity to learn.
• 9:48
  I don't enjoy the lessons that pain teaches me. I don't enjoy the lessons that struggle teaches me. But sometimes those lessons help me engage the world more deeply, understand myself more fully, feel more close to the eternal, to the divine in my life, to see things from another perspective. Pain can blind us to the possibilities, to what we're capable of when we face the moments ahead of us. But to sit with it, breathing through it and into it, to let it speak into our lives the story of the pain that brought us here, of the struggle that brought us here, is also the invitation to bring its own kind of healing.
• 10:56
  I don't want to tell you that there's a quick rush through the pain to healing, the quick rush through the struggle to healing. Oftentimes that just takes time. It just takes time and the willingness to face the pain. Not to try to short circuit it or avoid it or run away from it But to recognize it, to name it, to know it, to let the experience teach you what it will. And as you move through it to find the greater strength that you emerge with on the far side.
• 11:37
  Doesn't feel like it right now in the middle of it. Not at all. But as you learn to endure and to sit in the times when it's appropriate to do that, as opposed to seeking help, because there are really appropriate times and you might need help discerning that, there are appropriate times to seek someone who can help you work through the deep issues that may be the origin story of your pain. But running away from the pain just allows it to grow and be exacerbated in your everyday life by the small things. So, I want to invite you to inhabit your pain, not to run away from it, to face it, to deal with it, to experience it, to share it with someone who might help you figure out if this is something you can bear on your own or something you need some help with.
• 12:46
  But in the end, don't just run away from the pain because that place from which it came is going to still be there when you get to the next place. You know, one of the wisdoms of monasticism, particularly of some of the early ascetics, the early church desert mothers and fathers who talked about what is if you have a problem in one place and you think that all you have to do is move to another place to get over it, you will find that it is not true. That whatever you are struggling with in this place, you'll struggle with in the other place as well. So facing it, sitting with it, perhaps letting it teach you what it can is worth it. And at times turning to others to help you through.
• 13:45
  These are my thoughts about inhabiting pain and struggle. And there are thoughts that rise from my attempts in my life to do the exact same thing. I'm not always successful. Sometimes I run as fast as I can away from pain. But when I do stay with it, stick with it.
• 14:07
  I am often surprised where it came from and what it can teach me. Remember whatever you choose to do with your pain and struggle, whether you can inhibit it or not, that you are infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you already are. Thanks so much for joining me on this hundredth episode.