I notice that we are often so self obsessed that we miss the very thing that we are. We miss the qualities of beauty, divinity and presence. We miss the fact of our own goldeness, brightness, and brilliance.

We stay focused in our limited small painful existence. When we are in physical pain most of the time, it’s really very very difficult to find contact with a dimension of existence that is beyond this pain. Our very identity, who we think we  actually are, is constantly reinforced by our pain. We think we are our bodies, we think we are this physical person that walks around on two legs and is separate from every other physical person and thing. We are so completely sure that is what we are that we rarely get insight into any other view of reality.

What does pain do to reinforce this view, this perspective that we are a body having a purely physical experience?

Pain reinforces it. Each contraction of pain reminds us of the very physical nature of ourselves. Because we are so identified with ourselves as separate phsycial bodies, our attention,  awareness and actual energy goes directly to our experience of ourselves as a  body.

Simply put, pain happens in our body!  We might have emotional pain, which then impacts our body, and heart, we might have mental anguish and disturbing thoughts, that then make us disturbed and knocked off center, which then impact our bodies. But the bottom line is that pain reminds us of our physical existence.

In this pain community most if us are experts at focusing on, and knowing about every minute detail about our condition. We know all about the condition, it’s symptoms, it’s research, it’s public perception. We become so obsessed with all the latest findings and everyone else’s experiences and details about their condition that we magnify the negative.. We focus on the facts of the disease rather than the fact of presence, of stillness, goodness, intelligence and that life giving flow that underlies our existence.

We stay in a suffering oriented perspective. Our bandwidth of experience is limited or stretched by those who we hang about with. If we are not stretched, pushed, pulled beyond our normal range of thinking, feeling, and willing we remain trapped in a small orbit orienting around our own small life of pain.

We miss the very fact of our divine make up as beings made up of intelligent light.  We miss the very fact that we are part of a great cosmic rhythm that is connected to a vast, huge intelligence, unfolding and exploding with dynamic action, moment by moment.

It’s necessary to know about our physical condition, but I wonder how much we actually need to know. What has been very useful for me is to maintain a connection with freedom while I live my life as a spina bifida.  This is the freedom with pain philosophy. I live in Freedom with whatever I have, spina-bifida or pain.

I have never looked up on the net about the spina-bifida condition. I don’t even know at what part of L2 L3 or whatever on my spine the actual site of the condition is. I know my pain, and my life and I just do what I can to attend to it, and get on with things. I don’t obsess over my condition. I take actions to be kind and gently with myself, and I take actions that require me to stretch myself……I have never seen myself, or felt like  a victim of the spina-bifida condition.  This view and attitude has been a significant and important gift to help me not be focused and oriented around a label of spina-bifida. I have not been defined by my condition and never will be. I am way more than this spina bifida condition.

Any more and it just feeds our self obsession and then we lose contact with the bigger picture of positive goodness.

Think a bit about this.

I do think it’s really, really useful to have the support of others in these pain communities, only people who suffer ongoing pain that cannot be fixed, know what its like. Getting support from them is common sense and we need plenty of it to live a life in freedom with pain……

but what is real and I reckon most  important is to anchor ourselves to goodness, to the great presence that underlies all of life. That goodness gives us contact with Freedom while we live with our pain.

Tweet This Post

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.