Does Healing Have to Be Painful?

What is Healing?

Healing implies going from wounded to healthy. So let me clarify what kind of wounds I am talking about.

Your body can be wounded by accidentally cutting your hand with a knife, it can bruised and burned and maimed in all kinds of ways. This is the reality of life in a physical form, it has the potential to come into harm and pain. This isn't the kind of wound I am talking about though.

Most people are familiar with the terms 'psychological wound' or even 'emotional scar'. This is closer to what I am getting at. These wounds are what we could call internal or subtle wounds. They may not have an obvious physical symptom, although they sometimes can - that topic is beyond the scope of this article though. I will say however, that there is an important link here between the wounds we have in our hearts and minds - and what our experience with the outside world will be.

This is the spiritual journey in a nutshell, making things beautiful inside ourselves so that it reflects outward into our experience and on to other beings. You could call this illumination.

So in a round about way I am saying, it's important acknowledge the wounds and have some means of healing, clearing, accepting, transcending, allowing, opening, honoring, or perceiving them. It's important because the wounds we accumulate in this life, begin to constrict our being and the depth and breadth of our expression. It causes sadness and depression, it causes all kinds of things that are neither enjoyable or pleasant.

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What Causes Wounds?

I think most of my readers can answer this for themselves, because they are connected and perceptive people. They've also heard me ramble on about similar things in the past.

The short story is the experiences we go through cause wounds, especially things that happen when we are young. Particular events will leave a big imprint - it could discreet like a car crash, being attacked, being shamed, or any kind of overwhelming and painful occurrence. It could also be continual happenings like living with someone who is abusive, being bullied over a period of years, or being consistently judged and made to feel 'less than'.

These cause wounds, especially for very young and very 'open' people. It's to do with our heart centre. This is our facility for connecting with others, and it is best operated in a wide open state fully open to transmit and receive.

For whatever reason we are born into a time when many humans on the earth are running certain 'programs' that make them aggressive and unstable. Energetically these people will unconsciously try to cause wounds to someone who opens their heart to them. I am in no way saying that there are bad people that do bad things, what I am saying is that as wounded people we forget how to connect openly and innocently. So we connect from constriction and the 'safety' of being closed off and shut down.

It's frightening and painful for the one with the closed heart to see the one with the open heart, so soon enough attacks are made just as a matter of course. To try and take away that painful reminder of what is missing from our own wounded experience of life. This is the metaphysics of it, we get wounded because people are wounded and they inadvertently wound us.

Strangely enough, It's not actually their fault because they act out of pain. They will reap the karma of that way of being, yet an allowance is made for ignorance and an inability to perceive what is going on. The universe is infinitely kind to us, even as we stumble through and make a mess of it.

How Do We Go Beyond This 'Cycle of Pain?'

The simple answer is we see through it. By embodying the right perception there is no temptation to partake in any kind of 'battle' with other people. We see only wounded people who we can help if there is the right opportunity, or just leave them to their own karma. We feel compassion, we feel love, we don't blame. And we relinquish our constrictive need to be 'right' about things.

It's about going beyond duality. It's not about helping every stranger you see, it's about knowing that on a basic level all of our assumptions about life are made up and they block our perception. So we let go of ways of being and habitual judgments. Then we just see people, some of them are happy and some of them are in pain. It's neither good or bad, it just is. We have complete freedom to act as we choose from a place of equanimity.

Now that we have explored woundedness a little bit, let me come back to where we started - does healing have to be painful?

My answer is no it doesn't have to be painful, but it usually is 😁

The Mind Makes Everything into a Task

This means that we get stuck in the mode of the 'doer', it's a constructed identity that compulsively needs to control our experience of life. This isn't really us though.

It's an assumption that in order to be whole we have to go through some kind of 'ordeal' to purge everything that is blocking us. This was definitely true in my case, yet in the place I am now I feel that the way I went about this healing was not very effective. With a clearer understanding I could have came to the same place quicker and without going so deep into the void.

My story is not the whole story though, it's just a tiny part of it. And as I open up more to things bigger than me I see that we know so very very little. And the way that we do things tends to be clumsy because we only see so far. We are cute little kittens falling over ourselves, so let's know our place and just be cute for a while without over thinking it.

I was recently introduced to a powerful practitioner who led me through a 'quantum jump'. The theory of this practice, was that healings and activations could occur miraculously by leaping forward into the future. Effectively destroying all of the donkey work of struggling to get there. My experience is that it essentially works.

Going Beyond Logic and Linearity

It's actually a very three dimensional view of things - that needs everything to be a slow and gradual process which involves pain. This is what being in the body teaches us, and you will know this if you've been working on your strength and flexibility. Using the muscles and tendons and bones. It hurts, and we need to rest and recuperate. It only seems to make a difference after some time.

This is on the external physical level though, do the same rules apply in the internal world though?

I have heard many accounts of spontaneous 'awakenings' and healings which occur from people just being around the right guru. There is the story of the Zen master who strikes his pupil with a stick, instantly waking him up.

We have to acknowledge that something in consciousness is unexplainable, beyond logic, and capable of effortlessly achieving things. It has no agenda, and asks nothing from us. Which is why our 'transactional' mindsets are very much a hindrance to miraculous things such as healing and manifestation. We are so en trained into fear and doubt, that it seems to divert consciousness away from blowing us open.

This leads me to think that spontaneous healing WILL occur, yet in order for it to happen more reliably we need to set the right conditions in our life.

The main one would be actually believing that it is a possibility, if we don't believe that we can be healed then we are doubled back on ourselves with our manifesting power - shutting ourselves down. The other conditions are similar in that it's just about making more and more space for healing to occur.

Making Space for Miracles

What do I mean by making space? I mean identifying less and less with that voice in our head that is dissatisfied with everything. Judgement constricts us. Gratitude opens us up, it's an acknowledgement of how much outside of our personality game is going on and assisting us.

Benevolent forces abound, magnificent and powerful beings. Yet our 'stench' of judgement, hatred, and self pity does not set an auspicious scene for interaction to occur.

So like this we start to redirect the flow, putting our attention and energy into things that expand, and ignoring the things which contract.

Then with enough space inside us, sure enough opportunities and experiences start to open to us. Just the right thing at the right time. Is this not effortless? Is this not painless? Perhaps it isn't, but I think that it has a lot to do with how we have arranged our hearts and minds - and whether this allows us to connect outward into this huge life force, capable of miracles and things that we surely cannot explain.