In what areas of your life do you feel especially sensitive and liable to feel pain? How have you inadvertently arranged your life around the desire to avoid it? And most importantly, what can you do to let go of this pain?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many people feel fragmented and deeply unhappy because they’ve built their whole lives on pain avoidance. From childhood, they’ve unconsciously built their thoughts, actions, and beliefs around avoiding their inner pain. Spiritual growth<\/a> requires you to let go of pain, but for that, you must first embrace it, and only then, work on weeding out its source.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this article, you will learn how to let go of your inner pain. But first, you need to understand how pain is built up in the psyche.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n To understand inner pain and its effects, imagine that you have a thorn embedded in your arm, right on a nerve. It\u2019s a serious, impairing problem. Should you handle the pain by removing the thorn, or by making sure nothing touches it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you decide to protect the thorn, this work will consume your life. Any behavior pattern for avoiding pain will actually become a doorway for that pain to enter, because when you attempt to avoid your deep pain, you build layers of sensitivity around it.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In real life, you have just such a thorn. It\u2019s made up of your Samskaras, those blocked energies in your heart from stored-up past impressions. This is why your days are precarious as you navigate through potential pain points at every turn: You\u2019ve chosen to protect your thorn, so you\u2019ve made your life a minefield of pain. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For example, if your pain is about feelings of rejection, you may build a busy social schedule. You may dress, act, and talk in ways that your mind thinks will earn your friends\u2019 approval. And with these instinctive actions, you\u2019ve now sensitized all of these areas with your original pain, so that any one of them can now make you suffer. Other real-life examples might include sensitivities about loneliness, your physical appearance, your level of ability, or your intelligence. You have the same two choices with all: either build your life around protecting yourself from the pain, or remove its source.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n If you choose a life of protecting your thorn, you\u2019ll build a thorn-shaped life as your daily actions revolve around shielding the painful spot. <\/strong>Your thoughts and relationships will be about it. Your whole life will become a reflection of it. Instead of solving the problem, you\u2019ll make it the center of your universe. For example, if you suffer from loneliness, but instead of removing that thorn, you build your life around protecting yourself from the pain, you might keep people at a distance. You might marry someone who makes you feel the least lonely, but then you\u2019ll spend your whole marriage trying to please your spouse in order to avoid abandonment. And\/or you\u2019ll create a permanent state of emotional distance to preemptively protect yourself while making manipulative attempts to ensure the other person\u2019s devotion. Your life will be shaped around your thorn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To free yourself from a life of pain, employ the following principles which can take on a variety of practical forms:<\/p>\n\n\n\n 1)<\/strong> Use the events and encounters of your daily life as opportunities for liberation<\/strong>, Even watching a television show where the story arouses the pain of an inner thorn represents a chance for you to release the pain. Learn to watch the sensitive part of you. Notice when it\u2019s feeling a disturbance, such as jealousy, lack, or fear. Use these opportunities as they arise to embrace your pain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2)<\/strong> Release the initial pain early to avoid being trapped in the long term. <\/strong>The longer you wait, the harder it will be to let it go. Remember, if you let your spiritual heart<\/a> close around something, you\u2019ll be psychologically sensitive about that thing going forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 3) Learn that it\u2019s okay to feel inner disturbances because they don\u2019t disturb the seat of your consciousness<\/strong>. This is true freedom, the kind that comes not from solving your problems on the level where they present themselves, but from transcending them. Rest in the fact that you aren\u2019t the pain of your thorn, nor are you the thorn itself. Instead, you\u2019re the one who sees these things. And since inner thorns are just blocked energy from the past, you can release them. You don\u2019t have to fear them. They\u2019re just more things to be observed in the universe. View pain as energy passing through your heart before the gaze of consciousness. Instead of contracting and closing and damming up the energy, relax and let it go. Sometimes you can feel a palpable heat inside you as you release pain. It\u2019s called \u201cThe fire of yoga,\u201d and it\u2019s the feeling of pain being purified. Learn to enjoy it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 4) Finally, get some perspective.<\/strong> Go outside on a clear night and look up. Cultivate a proper sense of the massive scale of the universe and your relative insignificance within it. Do you really need\u2014do you really want\u2014to spend your life avoiding pain by choosing certain clothes?<\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition to deep pain, you have beauty, peace, freedom, and ecstasy inside you. They\u2019re on the other side of the pain. You have to go through the pain to find your true greatness. <\/strong>When you find there\u2019s a vast ocean of love beyond the fear and pain<\/a>, you\u2019ll encounter breathtakingly beautiful experiences. You\u2019ll forge a personal relationship with this inner force of beauty, and it will replace your current relationship with inner pain. Peace and love will now run your life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You\u2019re \u201caddicted\u201d to your psyche because you mistakenly think your psyche protects you from pain. But in fact, your psyche <\/strong>is<\/em><\/strong> pain. <\/strong>You need to realize that your psyche is very ill, as evidenced by its extreme sensitivity. When your physical body is healthy, you tend not to notice it. You only notice it when there\u2019s a problem. The fact that you frequently notice your psyche because of mental-emotional pain\u2014anger, embarrassment, anxiety\u2014shows you just how unwell it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your psyche\u2019s illness comes from fear and resistance. In learning about nonresistance and unconditional happiness<\/a>, you learned that your mind is unwell because you\u2019ve given it the impossible job of creating a secure world by resisting life, by trying to make everyone and everything do what you want. You\u2019ve set your psyche the task of conforming the whole world to your sensitivities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The good news is that you can break this addiction to your psyche. You do this in the same straightforward way that you\u2019d quit any bad habit: You just stop. Like refusing to put another cigarette in your mouth, you stop telling your mind that its job is to fix everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Breaking the addiction requires you to wake up and realize that the trouble is in you, not the world. You can\u2019t solve your inner problems by getting better at external games.<\/strong> External changes won\u2019t address the root of your inner problem. If you feel financially insecure and personally lonely, you\u2019ll still feel that way even if your finances improve and you find the \u201cperfect\u201d spouse, because you\u2019ll simply bring your inner problems into that new situation and infect it with negativity. Getting what you think you want doesn\u2019t satisfy you. It just sets the stage for the next round of pain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here are some specific practices for giving up your addiction:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once you\u2019re free from your psyche\u2019s demands, you can wake up and face each day like a vacation. You can enjoy your work<\/a> and relationships effortlessly. You can fall asleep each night and let everything go. Eventually, your practice of disciplined awareness will lead to a persistently centered consciousness. Like a healthy body<\/a>, your psyche will just operate naturally, without pain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In what areas of your life do you feel especially sensitive and liable to feel pain? How have you inadvertently arranged your life around the desire to avoid it? And most importantly, what can you do to let go of this pain? Many people feel fragmented and deeply unhappy because they’ve built their whole lives on pain avoidance. From childhood, they’ve unconsciously built their thoughts, actions, and beliefs around avoiding their inner pain. Spiritual growth requires you to let go of pain, but for that, you must first embrace it, and only then, work on weeding out its source. In<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":33619,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,43,6],"tags":[271],"class_list":["post-33581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-psychology","category-self-improvement","category-spiritual","tag-the-untethered-soul","","tg-column-two"],"yoast_head":"\nLet Go of Pain: Weeding Out Your Inner Thorn<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
You Can Remove Your Thorn<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The Bliss Beyond Pain<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Inner Pain and Addiction<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
You Can Break the Addiction<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Free and Clear<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n