Past Pain is Finished

You will never have to go through the pain of the most unpleasant, traumatic, or heart-breaking experiences in your life, again. They are finished. They may not be completely processed- sorrow or hurt linked to their integration- but the explicit pain you felt then will never have to be touched by you again.

For me, this takes the subtle pressure off, and in some way also demystifies, resolving life’s inherently painful experiences. It brings ease to know that I am only bound to them through my aversion and not through the possibility to encounter that same event again.

In the famous words of Dr. Gabor Mate ¨trauma is not what happens to you. Trauma is what happens inside of you as a result of what happens to you.¨ That means, the resistance that happened through my experience is what drives me to be on alert for it in my environment.

This is no doubt helpful and makes sense evolutionarily. However, resistance is tension. The challenge is that the bound energy, through tension in the body, wants to release because it´s inefficient. So, we will continuously come into contact with experiences that trigger the initial process until what is fixed or stuck returns to flow.

Think that, for some reason, your life was in danger if you didn’t contract all the muscles in your arms and legs while reading this (you can even try). In the moment where you become consciously aware that this is inefficient and unnecessary (i.e. have thoughts such as, ¨This doesn’t feel good. Why am I doing this?¨), you will stop doing it. When you relax the body, it naturally has more availability. You can feel the difference.

This example, while highly simplified, can help us gain perspective on what we are after when we say ¨healing trauma.¨ A phrase that has become quite in these days, so I think it’s important that we know what we’re trying to do. We are not after our painful experiences that happened in the past. We are noticing the tension, pressure, stress, and resistance which turn us away from those experiences.

Therefore, in the context of healing trauma, the narrative of what happened to us is only helpful insofar that it serves as a doorway into the place where that memory, hence tension, is stored in the physical and emotional body.

Then, we arrive in a new space where we can become aware of how we create the tension. In other words, we realize that ¨oh, it’s me creating this resistance¨ and then the process is re-owned through our understanding of how we do that. Not understanding as in conceptualization, but understanding through direct experience. It’s more how than why because, again, the story becomes secondary to the internal process.

I’m making this sound easy, but of course, we have a magical mind that has a life of its own when it comes to the patterns it worked hard to create. In the least, we can feel some weight drop off when we know that we will never have to deal with the pain we once did.

Not that pain itself will not come again. Negative. That is inevitable and you know it. But, the pain that we once had is not what is coming. You may think that is what’s coming, but the mind creates this in its collaboration with the body’s tension.

The Yoga Sutra states this perfectly saying ¨the pains which are yet to come are avoidable.¨ Yes, this is saying we can take preventative measures against future pain, but I also find it soothing. As if the author is saying ¨the pain that you think is coming is not the actual pain, so you can let go.¨

By softening resistance we avoid ¨pain that is yet to come¨ because we are open to receiving life in each moment. With openness to life as it is, our attraction or aversion to experiences no longer dictates how we color them. So our experience is simply our experience and not an interpretation of such. Again, this doesn’t mean that pain won’t happen but means that we are much less likely to hold onto it long after the experience occurs.

Moreover, we start to wire our world as a safer place when resistance to past experiences dissolves. We walk around welcoming the experiences that are yet to come rather than contracting to those we wish not to. The focus shifts. Our availability to life allows us to sink into the safety of the body, trusting that we can handle whatever comes our way.

In the end, we can love more because we are present to all circumstances. What a joy it is to relax into what we are, here and now.

As Rainer Maria Rilke so exquisitely puts it, “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”