"Suffering is pain that hasn't found it's meaning yet..."

This quote from  neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor's book My Stroke of Insight.  Her 2008 TED talk, My Stroke of Insight   by the same name, and currently holds the number 2 spot for most popular TED talks.   Jill's left-side brain stroke sent her on a journey that included an 8 year recovery.  Along the way, she decided that even though having her left brain largely unavailable to her put her in a  very peaceful, harmonious place, it also restricted her ability to communicate and contribute to our world.  She challenged herself to bring her damaged left hemisphere back on line WITHOUT reengage its negative emotional baggage.  She refers to this part of her brain as her story teller.She did the miraculous thing of figuring out how to stop her story teller (left brain identity centers) from attaching to pain.  She discovered that our emotions only last about 90 seconds in our blood stream.  If she was feeling a negative feeling longer than that it meant her story teller was somehow keeping it alive or that she was somehow attaching to it emotionally.  Toward the end of the audiobook, she says "suffering is pain that hasn't found it's meaning yet".  I flashed back on Victor Frankel's Man's Search for Meaning and how his drive to understand why in conditions of extreme pain and deprivation (Nazi Concentration Camps), some people psychologically connected to the best and most resilient in themselves and others did not.  Meaning and purpose played a significant role he concluded.  It allowed people to endure pain while somehow also seemingly transcending it.When the pain we are experiencing has a context, when we create a larger meaning and purpose for our trials and struggles, they can enlarge us.  We may well  experience pain, yet we do not have to experience suffering.  One of my teachers Richard Heckler Strozzi spoke of your "for the sake of".    Using this concept, when there is a challenge in our lives, especially one that is painful to us, what this challenge "for the sake of"?  Or what  "for the sake of " could you give your pain?  My sister, as she supported her husband through his long journey and eventual death from colon cancer appeared to create one of the most powerful contexts for his cancer and the pain they all endured.  Looking from the outside and observing her compassion for herself, for him and their daughters her "For the sake of" appeared to be living fully each moment that they had together.  They were both surprisingly present to the day to day joys available to them during so much of this journey.  Not necessarily "laugh out loud" joy, though she did plenty of that too, more like a deep abiding gratefulness for whatever particular moment she was experiencing.  And he seemed to be present without agenda and available to the moment and what was happening in a remarkable way.  The story teller (suffering generator) gets banished when that happens.  You know where this is going.  If you are "suffering", if you are experiencing negative thinking or emotional energy, look around for a large enough meaning for your pain and the suffering may well dissipate.   

Psyche (aka your unconscious): Holds all the trump!

More and more neuroscience is demonstrating the limits of the logical and the rational.  Thus proving C.G. Jung, (Jungian Psychology) to have been a prophet.  The power of the unconscious, the mysterious and unfathomable, within each and everyone of us is truly breathtaking.  AND it is efficient!  How does it get better than that?!I write about this because there are tools that one can use (many of which I have practiced for almost 2 decades) that help us actually hear the voice of our own psyche.  AND why that matters is because it turns out ..that it is not "Father who knows best" but Psyche.  (Yes, I am that old!)Our own sweet souls are what will make the best and happiest decisions on any and all matter of preference for each of us.  Whether it be the next car we buy, the person we live with or career path we take...or which pair of shoes to buy and where to go for dinner.    Psyche (soul) always speaks to us in the language of feelings, energy, moods and dreams.  She is always letting us know what will make us happy in the long run.So why aren't we happier?  Because our Strategic Mind generally overrules her and so quickly we often don't hear her at all.    She says, "I want light and space."  Strategic mind jumps in with "We can't move, we don't have time and where will we find....blah, blah, blah."  Conversation over...except it isn't because Psyche will now start to disturb our peace with ennui or discontent or weird dreams.  AND she won't stop.Our distrust of her is part and parcel of our inherent distrust of joy and happiness.  (See my post:  Trusting Joy).  Most of us trust suffering and struggle more than we do joy and happiness.  That is why we mostly change through the school of hardknocks.   What would happen is when Psyche whispered "I want light and space." we would respond with curiosity with "Tell me more"?Maybe we allow Strategic Mind (SM) to register it's concerns immediately...but in the spirit of a brainstorm, instead of control.SM:  "Look, the easy way would be to change our exisiting space if that is possible, but why is it you want light and space and are there other ways we could achieve that, because moving is a a big chunk of time and money?"And then the ideas surface.  The brainstorm is on.  Strategic mind doesn't have to and should not just say "yes" to Psyche, it is meant to be a true conversation between the rational and irrational within us.  We can learn how to stay in the tension of the conflicting needs within our own minds, knowing that one day something greater than either "move or stay here and ignore the need for light and space" will emerge.  Einstein said, "you can't solve a problem with the level of thinking that created it."  I say, ask yourself where you are stuck.  AND put those two opposites together and ask "how can I have both X and Y?"  Then settle in and wait, trusting that an answer will come.  Stay open.  Wait for what is fresh, new and alive to arrive.  

Accept - Then Act

 “Accept—then act.  Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it… This will miraculously transform your whole life.”  Eckhart TolleTolle is right.  If I choose something, then I trust that it is somehow a benefit for me, even if only in the long term.  If I choose something, I don’t waste time and energy wishing for a different reality.I am in a two-year IRS audit.  So let’s test-drive this idea: I chose this audit.  Hmmm, how might that be true?  Well, through this audit (now going on three months), I can say the following:I am learning to accept, embrace and actually be grateful for my imperfections and inadequacies.  Through this audit both my accountant and the IRS agent have criticized me.  I have been accused and shamed.  I have been talked to with an exasperated voice. Until this audit, I did not know I still held somewhere inside of me a sense of inferiority and even shame for being so right-brained and not linear or sequential, for how I am made.I have struggled with my strange and random way of being in the world my entire life.  I am not linear.  I have no sense of Chronos time, sequential time, or quantitative time.  I am very present.  I live in qualitative time.  I am deeply aware and connected to energy.  I have enjoyed the gifts of being primarily right-brained.  The right brain makes things whole.  It has a great capacity for wonder, awe and depth.  It is a holy way to experience the world.  But all my life, I have felt somehow defective because I have been so different from people I admire.  My favorite story has been The Ugly Duckling, the story of a swan chick raised by ducks and ostracized for his lack of swan-ness.  Until one day he sees who he truly is, and he is at home in the world.   Stories of exile, like this one, are my story.  These stories might be yours too, but for an entirely different reason.  Most of us, feel somehow “other” or different than most.This audit took me on the journey of exile, and today I am at home in the world as it is and as I am.  I accept both and believe I have chosen to be here and to be here as I am. I am at peace with my unusual self.Where do you need to accept yourself?  But not in spite of how you are made, because of how you are made?