Two days ago, in our Online Intention Circle, we shared our pain and healing happened.
Many of us arrived to the meeting facing isolation blues. People spoke of depression, sadness, lonliness, difficulty just sitting with ourselves, feeling like we don’t have freedom, feeling like we can’t have fun.
What did we do with this? Those of us that facilitate these circles don’t plan it, we just open ourselves to what wants to come through in the moment, what came through was a meditation we had not tried before. To share our pain.
The meditation was fairly simple. First we settled ourselves with breathing and found where these hard emotions were held in our bodies. Then we sent love to these areas, both mentally, emotionally, and physically with breath and a light touch. We’ve done an exercise like this before, and we know it works for people to more easily move through their emotions. But then something new happened. Even though we were all online, we imagined ourselves sitting in an energetic circle. We imagined a ring of light connecting us all, each person in their perfect spot in the circle. And then, while we kept one hand on our emotional pain, we took our other hand and imagined placing in into the ring of the circle. We felt the others in the circle. We offered support to all of them. And then, powerfully, we gave our pain to the circle.
I was facilitating this meditation and it took me a few minutes to really let go and give the circle my pain, trust that all those in the circle with me were more than capable of handling it, holding it, witnessing it, and supporting it.
Remember, we are not trying to fix our pain, we are trying to love it. When we love it, it changes by itself. So I encouraged our participants to give a little bit more of their pain to the circle. Loosen themselves and give more pain to the circle of all of us. And at the same time we were holding support for others who were giving their pain.
Something amazing happened. Almost every person in the meeting said that the pain sharing changed what was happening in their bodies. The emotions didn’t entirely disappear, but they became lighter, softer, more bearable. We started the meeting with low spirits and lots of somber sharings. We ended the meeting joking and full of smiles.
The big lesson here is to share our pain without the need for anything to happen. We are obsessed in our society with doing everything ourselves. We carry our emotions around like huge heavy suitcases in our subconscious. These wounds feel rejected and separate from love, so the natural subconscious reaction to these feelings is to keep them hidden, stay separate, don’t be exposed or we will be hurt again. We are also obsessed with fixing. We are constantly labeling our feelings as "bad" or "unproductive" and we do all we can to avoid, escape or cajole ourselves into feeling something different.
In our little experiment, we did the opposite of these obsessions. When we simply shared our pain, without even talking about it for more than a couple of minutes. While supporting others to do the same. The pain changed. It was one of the most enjoyable emotional processes of my life.
Why do everything the hard way? Humans are a social species. Physcially, energetically, spiritually, we are all intimately connected and yearn to be more connected. There is no way around it. It seems so obvious to me now that we are designed in some way to heal by sharing. This doesn’t even need to involve talking. It just involves presence and invoking and the deeper way we are all already connected, energetically.
As always, don’t believe me. Try it yourself. Get a group of people and follow my loose instructions as best you can. Or join an Online Intention Circle.
Love, David