Are we looking at life the wrong way?

Are we?

If we took a closer look at our beliefs, we’d realise that most, if not all, are myths. One of them is that pain is our enemy, and pleasure, our friend, and that to attain it, you have to get rid of the first a.s.a.p. The psychological or emotional pain is perhaps one of the most misunderstood subjects in all human history, and we have proof the failure of medicine and psychology to help eradicate it, and the ever-growing profits of the pharmaceutical industry.

Take art, music, literature, science; you name it! The most celebrated oeuvres were born as a result of one form or another of pain, being the inner torture of the mind or spirit, searching for meaning or Source, an impossible love affaire, a betrayal, any form of loss that touches the human psyche.

Healing is another example. Anyone who has gone through significant life-changing events leading to their spiritual emergence and their miraculous healing, as a result, will tell you that they have awakened and healed after, and as a result of much pain and suffering.

Pain, in itself, is not the enemy, nor the painful events, but our reaction to them.

As long as we view our pains as “bad” in need of immediate fixing; as long as we shame them and cover our eyes pretending not seeing the nakedness and ugliness of our own birth-giving, the mess surrounding it, but as necessary as the water breaking of a mother about to give birth; as long as we try to deny this moment, part of our natural evolution, and as long as we see it as an ugly ass mess that needs to be hidden from public eyes, we will be forever caged and chained to an illusion of who we are, and never allow these transformative moments that we call “despair” to take us to our greatness.

So what’s the myth here? That if you hit a depression period or are tortured by something inside asking to come out, you have to adopt reasonable attitudes, chant, repeat some affirmations or take the “happy pill” to get rid of your miserable state.

Evolution came as a result of pressure. Records of human abilities have been set by going through this massive pressure and not stopping in between, but instead forging through it, and with the last gasp come at the other end more alive and better than before.

All our pressure moments, especially the more challenging, are signposts that we have reached a state requiring us to move to the next level of our being. Every pain and sufferance are catalysts that push us deeper into ourselves.

A coin has two sides. So has Life. We often call this “the reverse of the medal”. You have one day a great experience and feel amazing, lucky.  You have that feeling that your prayers or hard work are finally reaping fruit. You feel special. You have forgotten about the bad luck or pain. You are back in the game, right? But, if you’ve been around long enough, you know that it won’t last. Weather is love with its intensity and boiling passion, a business association or an idea that seemed so great heading for massive success, it will last until… well, until it’s time for the other side of the coin to play its part. Now shit hits the fan once again. You despair, curse, get angry with the sky, with anyone who could take a slice of the blame to make the hard pie smaller for you. You either hide and wait for the season to pass, or you’ll try to “fix it”. Wrong strategies, my friend!

We’ve been blinded by myths since a young age. We’ve been blinded to think in good and bad, light and dark, either or terms, when they are the extremes of the same cycle; they are sisters, not enemies. We keep talking about Nature, “preserving nature, save the nature,” etc. when the ones who need saving are us, and the one who has the lessons is in fact Nature.

Do you think that any living creature, other than the humans, thinks “light is good, dark is bad”? Light is good for some and bad for others. Same with dark. In the end, each extremity of the 24-hour circadian cycle serves a larger cycle of life. There is a perfect dance between action and rest, just as in the extremities of summer and winter.

Each phase of our life, no matter how brutal may appear or feel, works by the same perfect rhythm of nature: there is something to give, and something will be taken away. Where there is a loss, there will automatically be a new, often greater gain. Look back over your life with hindsight and discover for yourself this truth! Until we are pressed hard with our back against the wall, we don’t make any move forward, but when this happens, we make literally quantum leaps.

This myth applies to many areas, but especially to healing. People see their ill health as “a bad thing that happened to them”, and in itself, without any counsel seeked from its messenger (the symptom), it will eventually resume itself to just that. But remember of the other side of the coin, ask yourself:

What is the good that this “bad” is trying to deliver to me, to teach me? What is the lesson here to be learned? What do I have to take home? What course do I have to change? How far in the woods have I got lost that I needed such a strong impulse to force me to look deep inside? By the natural law of compensation, there is always a higher advantage than the disadvantage we are traversing.

Same way in reverse. With each “gain” there will be a subsequent loss: you gain the new and lose the old in an ever continuum cycle. After night comes day; after day comes night, no surprise! And if you know your seasons, some nights are longer than others, just as the days too. Same with our pleasures and pains.

In our modern prowess of playing with and trying to defy the natural laws, we’ve managed to screw the basics up to such extent that now we think we need another kind of scientific invention to cure the result of our dabbling with forces of nature that we have yet to fathom.

The truth is, all we need to do is go back to basics and learn to work with nature rather than against it.

The four seasons of a year are present in all our lives: in spring we feel young, full of steam and ideas, eager and a bit crazy. No surprise that spring is the season where most of the population feels a rise in hormonal talk. In summer we flourish and expand our activities, we are at the pick of physical activities. We spend more time outside, we capture and store for the winter the heat and the sun. It is in spring that we saw; in summer that we tend to the growth and the weeding of our work; in autumn we harvest the results of our hard work and prepare for the winter, when we should rest, revise our results and the lessons learned, getting ready for a new and more vibrant cycle.

Copyright Gratiela M. Rosu 2018