- We all have hidden parts of ourselves that are in pain, even if we had a happy childhood and aren’t aware of emotional pain. If you’re human, and especially if you grew up in a Western shame-based culture, you’ve got some lodged in there. Guaranteed.
- Our deepest pain points directly at our life purpose, like the true north on a compass. And living our purpose is what leads to feeling happy and alive, and helping others at our highest potential. It is not possible to fully live and embody your life purpose without understanding your pain. So, yeah, pain ain’t all bad.
- Your personality power base (as Oprah calls it), or what I call your “superpower”—that thing you’re so naturally amazing at that you probably don’t even know about it—is also formed by your pain parts as an adaptive survival mechanism (thank you primitive brain; I knew you were good for something!). Sometimes you will have a couple of these amazing abilities. Align these with your purpose, Oprah says, and no one can touch you.
- These “pain” parts join together to create a “pain body”(as explained by Eckhart Tolle). How you experience it is like this: you get in an argument with your partner about something small and stupid, but the next thing you know it’s a full-blown fight that ends with you talking about breaking up. This is what happens when two pain bodies get activated and neither person has enough awareness to de-escalate the situation.
- Until we heal our pain parts, they will project themselves out into our external experiences to get our attention. So, they will show up in our relationships, our career, and our health, and the longer we ignore them the louder they will become. Why? So they can be healed and you can live as your True Self, of course. You are a self-guided energetic being. Those difficult or confusing experiences in your life are actually a form of guidance from you to you saying: “Hello! You’ve got some work to do!”
- These pain parts are created when our caregivers/community do not act in a way that appears to value and support our True Self during our formative years (roughly age 0-10, but can include 11-15). They are also created when we misunderstood what a situation meant. We are born knowing that we’re whole and perfect as we are, with unique gifts and interests, and if those aren’t acknowledged or nurtured we feel really confused. And then we usually try to become whatever is expected of us (Enter: The False Self).
- Emotional pain is a normal, healthy feeling that happens to alert us to the fact that someone did not acknowledge and value our True Self in the past. It can also alert us when it’s happening in the present. This “alarm” will also go off when we ourselves are not acknowledging and valuing our True Self. So, yeah, that bad feeling is just a helpful alert system, a self-guiding compass, saying “Hey, someone isn’t honouring your True Self .”
- Where the confusion happens. When we feel “bad” as a child, we often think that it means we ARE bad. This is a problem that is unique to competitive shame-based cultures. When the Dalai Lama came to the U.S. and a well-known meditation teacher asked him to share his wisdom on self hatred, he couldn’t understand the question. He found it incomprehensible.
- So the pain parts are not created by our painful experiences—they are created as a result of misunderstanding what those experiences meant about our personal safety, identity and value as a human being.
- These pain parts can be healed by acknowledging them and creating a new, loving relationship with them where they are able to feel heard, and are given the time and space to be processed and integrated. By creating a gentle, loving relationship with them, they naturally begin to heal and shift, freeing up trapped energy and allowing us to feel more alive. This also clears away patterns of belief and behaviour that are creating limitations for us on our journey, so we can live our purpose as our True Self.
So…yay pain!
Thanks for teaching me how to connect with, nurture, love and heal you, so I could finally experience the transformative shift of reconnecting with my True Self (and, ehm, thanks for not coming around too often anymore! As much as I appreciate you, it has been wonderful to experience hanging out with your cousins, joy and gratitude for a bit.)
And that’s what I wish for you.
Rise and shine as your True Self,
Shawn xo
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