The Only Way That Works
La única manera que funciona
A reflection on why true freedom lies not in avoiding painful emotions but in welcoming them fully, and why so few of us have ever seen this modeled.
The Only Way That Works
A reflection on why true freedom lies not in avoiding painful emotions but in welcoming them fully, and why so few of us have ever seen this modeled.
Of the two options, not only is one preferable, but one is actually possible. What happens is that we are not surrounded by people who know this experientially, who know the possibility of it. We are surrounded by people, and we were raised by people, who are all trying to stop feeling, to control feeling. So we learn that this is the only way. But it is actually a very defective way. Now we need to learn that there is another way, and it is the only way that works. We have practically no one around us who knows about it or has any experience of it.
Freedom is not the absence of experience
And yet that is the only place where freedom exists. Because freedom is not the freedom to no longer experience something. That is not freedom. That is slavery to that experience. It is an experience that now dictates where all of your energy goes: toward not experiencing something. So that experience is ruling you.
Compare that with this: no matter how much fear, pain, powerlessness, shame, or any other emotion I feel, no matter how much, how often, or how intensely, I am completely welcoming it. Come and go as you wish. That sounds a lot more like freedom. None of that experience has any power over you.
This is actually possible
As crazy as it sounds, this is possible. I can tell you from experience that 99.9% of the time over the last several years, this has been my reality. And it is not about not having fear. It is not about not having pain.
I broke a lot of bones in this hand from rage. There was so much emotional pain, and the rage was just a way to convert that pain into a different experience. I went at a wooden beam in the house and started bashing it, and I ended up in the hospital with a bunch of broken bones. That is how much I could not tolerate the pain I was in.
Pain as a current of aliveness
And the pain did not go away after that. What happened is that whenever pain came, it became a current of aliveness, almost sweet and joyful. That is why I always say the direction is toward fear, toward pain. Not for us to create and fabricate fear and pain, but for us to move toward the intimacy of relationship with fear and pain as a practice, as a path, as a direction toward more freedom.