Pain is Your True Soulmate
It is the first day of a new beginning. Time for celebration, or to follow up on resolutions made?
How about we make a toast to pain? What we might be celebrating is in fact a life that haunts us every step, a life that enslaves us rather than sets us free: we try to fit in with our social circles, keep up with the Joneses (or Kardashians), stay up to date through social media, follow our “true” passions, make needed career changes, get married, ask for that promotion, become an entrepreneur, listen to our parents, surround ourselves with comforts we think we need, escape sorrow by means of indulgences, try to change the world, or go on a quest to find our true self.
I say, let the the sirens of today's madness sing of wants and needs, let the ghosts of yesterday wail of regrets and the demons of tomorrow threaten with fears. I say, sit down and let them howl, rage, pull at you, and attempt to tear you to pieces. Could this instead be the moment you choose change, and through change freedom?
All those voices from inside your head and from the influential social environment, telling you what to want and what to need in order to achieve happiness, assert themselves as being indispensable to a free life, yet they are the very opposite: they are Machiavellian creatures seeking domination over you by exploiting your biggest weakness: pain.
Pain.
There, I said it. Suffering. Let it summarize all that you try to avoid and fear to acknowledge: guilt, tragedy, insecurities, trauma, fear, loss, mistrust, loneliness and other psychological turmoil. Breathe it in, bravely endure it, and even embrace it like you would your true soulmate. Let all hell break loose in your head but do not identify with any of it: it all comes, makes an awful lot of noise, but eventually passes. You are NOT your pain, but it is crucial that you go through it. I am not just telling you, I am urging myself to do the same, as it has always been my challenge too.
Then do something wild and creative: write, draw, paint, sing, dance, or do whatever makes you feel a free soul for the moment it lasts – as long as it does not harm yourself or others. Let all the pain be the energy that drives you to new extremes, until a thing of beauty emerges, a rare gem that would otherwise have been lost to mankind. Do not rationalize it, choreograph it, formalize it, describe it, or in any other way allow it to confine the untamed primitive flame: just go wherever it guides you. And when the dust has settled, exhaustion has finally caught up with the wild intoxication, and wet pearls trickle down the worn landscape of your tormented face, only then start trying to make sense of it all, and the result, a true masterpiece beyond any externally imposed standards – as it just IS – should be the perfect equilibrium between that wild untamed freedom that lies behind all that pain and the orderly form of you that exists in a relatively orderly universe.
Do not fear your pain, as the world is full of those who cannot handle their own pain and therefore seek to exploit your pain, and your pain will set you free, raise you to new heights of creativity and self-realization. And again, you will not need to dwell in pain indefinitely, but the sea of sorrow must be crossed to reach the other side.
Image: By Martin Falbisoner - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27187241
? 2019 Marcel van Delft