“The suffering we accumulate only seeks to be released. That is all.”From Deshojando el Corazón de la Eternidad
I remember some very difficult years very vividly. I was living in India, looking for experiences that would bring some spiritual knowledge into my life, and the sense of not being complete, of feeling empty, the despair and a deep pain filled my days and my hours. A part of me wanted to run away and go back to my worldly life. Many nights I wondered whether it was really worth sacrificing my youth.
I lived like a monk, with no temple or monastery, and I could not tell whether that suffering was a punishment life was imposing on me. Even so, something behind that pain told me there was a truth within me.
One afternoon, when sadness was overtaking my heart, I decided to go with a friend to a city in the south of India, beside a sacred mountain. I climbed the mountain without knowing what to expect, only trying to be present, one step at a time, while the pain in my heart grew sharper and sharper. When I came down, a great longing flooded me, an infinite pain I could not explain or define, much less understand. The pain of being on an endless search.
I went out onto the balcony of the room where I was staying, and tears poured from my eyes, uncontrollable and abundant, like a river overflowing in winter. I was gripping the balcony railing. At one point the pain was so intense that my legs began to shake, and before I could think or react, I found myself on the floor. Then I asked myself: What does this pain want to tell me?
Turning up the volume
When I managed to pull myself together, I sat on the bed and did the opposite of what anyone would do. Instead of running from the pain or fleeing it, instead of distracting my mind with some other experience, I simply decided to be present with this suffering. I confronted it face to face. Once and for all I had to take on the great fear I carried: the fear of suffering, the fear of feeling, the fear of being ordinary and perhaps the fear of dying in ignorance.
For the first time, I allowed myself to feel that emotion with my whole being, as if I could turn up its volume. The sensation began to move from my heart to other areas of my body, until I felt that my whole body was in pain; and the more aware I became, the deeper that pain went into everything I perceived as my being. Then it transformed. It stopped being emotional suffering and became a much subtler vibration that encompassed my whole being.
Staying present, I began to locate the points of greatest tension in me, put my fingers on them and began to breathe. Little by little I realized that the more aware I became and the more I allowed myself to feel it, as I breathed the energy, the more its intensity went down. The points of tension moved from one part of my body to another, and I became more and more aware of everything that was happening. The emotion melted like butter.
That day I understood that the pain we accumulate is only seeking to be acknowledged and finally transcended in our true nature. All we need to do is be aware and give ourselves the chance to release the pain we have trapped. From that day on, I began to do the opposite of what I had done before: instead of running from suffering, I took it on face to face. And all my old emotional scaffolding began to collapse.
Pain is not a punishment
In those years I did not know whether my suffering was a punishment. There comes a moment when the seeker realizes that life is not punishing him, that suffering is part of this level of experience, and then his heart opens to compassion. He recognizes that his pain is not the punishment of a distant Divinity or a vengeful God, but unreleased pain that becomes his teacher and his guide. And he discovers that it is really Divinity that is in him, living, loving and transcending its own pain.
Pain stays when we resist it. Karma is exactly that: energy trapped inside the body. For the soul to be freed from it, that energy must be let go.
Until we are willing to feel certain experiences, they will not be resolved. When we repress or avoid them, what has built up will look for a new chance to express itself, and we will live it again and again, from different perspectives, until it has been fully felt.
Emotions are energy
When I began my process of meditation, while I was living in Thailand, it was like opening the garbage dump of pain I had stored away. Not only did I have to let what I had carried since my childhood rise up from deep within me; now I needed to process it and transform it. One of my close friends told me then: “Breathe it.” That is how I came to understand the importance of connecting with the energy that was arising in me, and that emotions were exactly that, pure energy. If I kept recreating that pain in my life, in relationships, circumstances and feelings, it was because I had not managed to break that identification with the past.
Aren’t you tired of feeling pain in your heart and finding no solution? There is nothing outside you that can fill your inner voids. No person or object can quench that pain, because it was generated deep inside you, and it is right there, in that depth, that it will have to be transformed. Meditating and decompressing your emotions becomes essential to release all that energy; that, and the intention of wanting to release it. You hold in your hand the magic wand that makes this release happen.
Embracing it with the heart
There is no need to become a different person to find love. Become more aware of what is happening inside you, and I am not talking about a rational and vain self-assessment, but a true confrontation with your pain: finding it, dragging it out into the light, embracing it with your heart and feeling it. You must be able to acknowledge whatever takes your peace away, because that is the starting point of transformation. Only from your heart will you allow the universal Father-Mother to come into your life and love every aspect of you.
You don’t need to suffer in order to learn. Love arises without suffering: they are complete opposites. When the pain comes back, don’t run from it. Stay with it, feel it, breathe it and embrace it with your heart. All it wants is to leave.
From Dr. Zuluan Orion's books: Deshojando el Corazón de la Eternidad · El refugio del corazón · Illumination