“When we accept all of life’s contradictions, when we can comfortably flow between the banks of pleasure and pain, experiencing them both while getting stuck in neither, then we are free.” Deepak Chopra
Below is from “The Presence Process” by Michael Brown.
From the moment we enter this world, we are taught by example of others to fear and therefore resist pain and discomfort by controlling it, sedating it, distracting ourselves from it, numbing it, drugging it, and even going so far as cutting it out. By the examples of others, we are led to believe that pain and discomfort are our enemies and that when they manifest in our experience, we must escape or conquer them at all costs. We are led to assume that pain and discomfort are always indicators that something is wrong. In this world, it is very rare that we are invited or encouraged to respond to our experience of pain and discomfort by listening to them instead of running from them.
During The Presence Process we are being asked to consider the possibility that the experience of pain and discomfort is deliberate and therefore on purpose. In other words, when these experiences occur to us, it is because they are supposed to happen. We are asked to open our mind to the idea that pain and discomfort are essential forms of communication that have necessary and valuable function in our life experience. We are being invited to change our perception of what pain and discomfort are and what the nature of our relationship is with them.
We are being invited to consider that pain and discomfort are our friends, not our enemies, and that they have come to assist us, not hurt us.
Consider what the experience of pain and discomfort automatically accomplishes. It always obediently brings the focus of our attention to a specific place in our physical, mental or emotional experience. Why?
Consider how we impulsively react to this experience. Metaphorically we run in the opposite direction by pulling our attention away from area that is experiencing pain and discomfort. We do our best to annihilate our awareness of this experience with tablets, alcohol, or various medical procedures. In other words, we automatically attempt to resist and suppress the experience through control and sedation. What are we assuming?
Our reactive behavior never resolves the pain and discomfort; it merely suppresses and postpones it for a time. Inevitably, the pain or discomfort will reappear at a later date and continue its attempt to gain attention or show up in another form elsewhere. Consider this possibility:
The most painful thing about pain and discomfort may well be our resistance to it.
During The Presence Process, our suppressed memories are going to be surfacing deliberately so that they can be integrated by our compassionate attention. Pain and discomfort in the body, mind, and heart are our physical, mental or emotional bodies calling for our attention so that we will attend to them. Yet our impulse is always to run away from these experiences or find someone else to attend to them. What we are now being asked to consider is this: maybe our lack of success in resolving our pain and discomfort in the past is because it is not possible for someone else’s attention to integrate our experience on our behalf. What we are being invited to consider is that because it is our physical, mental or emotional body that is in a state of imbalance, that it is therefore our attention and only our attention that can really restore balance to our experience.
All of our prophets, spiritual masters, and sacred texts tell us that the omnipresence that we have named God resides within all of us. If we can on some level begin to accept this, even initially only as a concept, then we can also begin to accept another possibility – that in our life experience, our direct link to the intimate presence and unlimited healing power of what God is to us is to be found in the presence of our consciously wielded attention. However, the possibilities contained in this realization remain mental gymnastics until we begin exploring them experientially. The only way we can know if this is true is to consciously and compassionately wield our attention with the intention of resolving our own states of physical, mental, and emotional imbalance. In other words, our experience must become our own laboratory, our own testing ground.
During The Presence Process, we are deliberately using the breath as a tool to bring our attention back into our physical, mental, and emotional bodies to temporarily anchor it there. One of these consequences of this practice is that we become aware of pains and discomforts that have been with us since we were children, but that we have successfully suppressed from our awareness.
Michael Brown
What I find so affirming to my experience is that all the pain and discomfort in my body and mind, as well as the volume of emotional pain were here to bring me messages.
Not just a simple message, but books of messages that I had discounted for 46 years, they all came running forth once they understood that I was willing to hear them. It seemed they lined up for miles and months eagerly spilling forth what I failed to notice for so many years.
Here to show me just how out of balance my life was. The further from reality you are, the greater the discomfort and pain and a longer line of unfelt and unexpressed emotions!
Isn’t it amazing that they waited so long, crammed into my body, one discomfort piled upon another, heaped to the brim and overflowing, pain leaking out into various body parts screaming to me, I was busting at the seams!
A hoarder of pain and discomfort!
I M Perfect lady 