REFLECTIONS April 09 Newsletter - When Pain Is Your Teacher

As I have begun to heal, I have seen this lesson everywhere. What I notice is that my life reflects back to me, the problem and the solution. But without mindfulness and awareness of the present, I fail to grasp the wisdom that is contained within this moment.

Mindfulness and Therapy

"A further sign of health is that we don't become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it's time to stop struggling and look directly at what's threatening us." Pema Chodron

Mindfulness is the ability to stop struggling or fighting with what is and to face up to what we fear. It is our willingness to see what we are experiencing, without judgement and to welcome our experience and invite it to enlighten us. Like a good friend, it arrives in our psyche or our body, to offer its wisdom.

This messenger comes in many forms. We often begin the journey of seeking wellness through therapy because of emotional pain, relationship conflict, loss, substance abuse, or the search for deeper meaning in their lives. While our unique experience is shaped by our ethnicity, our gender, our sexuality; our birth order and our family of origins; we all carry wounding that centers itself in our fear and shame.

With all of my clients, I serve as a kind of mirror. Using awareness and attention to the present moment with all its experience, I reflect, without judgement. I serve as a kind of teacher and guide into the territory that has terrified or confused for so long. Through the experience of being heard, we become more adept at listening to ourselves. My clients use this experience to increase their own self awareness and self acceptance as well as using other disciplines that support their growth.

Mindfulness and the Heart

Fear constricts. Love expands. Mindfulness enables us to expand our hearts.

When we live our lives from a place of fear, we become high-jacked in to states of physiological arousal that affect our ability to problem solve. We often live out habitual reactionary states when fear is our normal. This hampers our power as people, to consider the infinite possibilities of our lives. Fear keeps us in the cage of "should's", "have to's" and "must's" ; rather than living from a place of our truest desire and passion.

Fear is a constant part of the human experience. But we can learn to observe our fear, without becoming enslaved to it.

We can expand our hearts beyond fear. Through mindful ways of living and being, we can live our lives from the ground of our infinite hearts and our truest desires. In traditional psychology, we might understand this as our "differentiated adult" or our "actualized self". There are many roads that can help us find the way to our center: our open heart. And when we are ready to make this journey, we will usually encounter a book, a teacher, a therapist, or a mentor that brings us along the next leg of our journey.