Much of the work on personal growth often seems to focus on overcoming weaknesses and healing wounds. However, instead of viewing these topics as problems to fix, a more holistic approach could be to see them as your teachers and guides.
You could even say that your karma is your guru, always highlighting the themes of your personal mythology that reveal where your soul wants to grow. If you learn how to journey to the underworld and attend to the mysterious patterns of that mythology, you can begin to make friends with the energy, including the pain, and nurture it by becoming conscious of what is happening and meeting the sensations as they are, without requiring them to change.
The meeting of the painful parts might not sound very appealing at first, but if you stop to consider what lies on the other side of taking that action, it can start to make more sense. For starters, avoiding pain means you are actively ignoring a part of your genuine experience and the part that has induced the pain to get your attention. The pain, whether physical or more mind-based in it’s nature, is a manifestation of something emerging in your psyche that is requesting to be attended to. That’s our most unique personal wisdom becoming visible right there, no need to second-guess or look for outside analysis to wonder what to do with the discomfort – and you can be sure the boons arising from this orientation are addressing the true underlying energy.
Many times though, our strategy has been to look away from the pain, to medicate it, or even to meditate ourselves calm in order to avoid feeling the anxiety. As a result, we have completely missed the underlying message it was trying to convey. A better strategy, at least in terms of creating desired transformation, would be to not resist it but to acknowledge and align with it so that it can deliver its wisdom and possibly provide an insight that leads to the right action.
By beginning to acknowledge the pain in this way, we embody the warrior who wants to help us live life to the fullest, rather than be limited by the fears that have caused us to withdraw from the arenas we wish to explore, initially seeking rescuers to make us feel safe.
And over time, the pain that once felt overwhelming becomes a doorway into deeper trust, deeper clarity, and a deeper relationship with the once-hidden parts yourself.