What does it mean to suffer?
Pain is mandatory. Think of the archetypal birth experience. And even that's not necessarily fraught with pain either. At least, not by definition.
Women have orgasms while giving birth. I thought this was an urban myth, until I met a few. This isn't to say that 'I need to shame myself if I didn't have an orgasm while giving birth.' No. The spectrum of human experience is broad and beautiful.
Let's use that as a good entry point into suffering, actually.
A lot of us will find our way into suffering no matter what is going on externally. Because if fulfills a few purposes for us (and it's up to us to determine what those are). I have a relative that connects to others through complaining. Perhaps you do to? That's all he's ever known.
When someone asked me about it, I said 'his life isn't bad, he's just that if he's talking to someone, he's complaining. That's how he connects.'
Now, here's the riddle. The quality of our life is the quality of our perception of it. So is his life 'not that bad' or is it 'terrible'
People that have everything they've ever wanted and still find ways to suffer. Because they carry the familiar into the moment, and push the joy into the future.
As noted psychotherapist Stanislav Grof and others have noted, the inception of our patterns is the birth experience, literally. C-section, calipers, medications, etc., all leave their imprint on the earliest cells. Now, I think trauma was woven into the human experience as a catalyst for awakening. (Peter Levine and I agree on this).
What I've been pondering is... why do certain patterns arise at certain times in life?
I find that the most fertile work is done after age 35 (I generally don't work with people that are younger than that), and usually around age 50. Some therapists say that after 25, it is a 'lost cause' and people hardly change their core patterns.
Well, let's put it this way... the tools that are mainstream are not capable of affecting change at all, so when someone is young and less entrenched, they have at least a better chance of braving the impossible odds.
However, with what we do here, change is inevitable, regardless of age.
Back to the birth experience. If your patterns began at birth, we need something like a 'rebirth.'
This can be enacted somatically. You literally re-enact the birth experience, with an individual or a circle of practitioners and participants called a 'womb surround.' The play the circumstances at birth: you play the witness. John Upledger does some interesting writing about this, as does William Emerson.
In my experiece (and I've facilitated quite a few of these), this is not the most dramatic change agent. It's just interesting and mind-expanding, because we can begin to see that we do carry much that we are unaware of. People want to do it emotionally.
However, the thing we want to do the least is often the thing we need to do the most, and vice versa. You want to enact a birth experience, when what you really need is to finish grieving your mother, for instance.
There's a famous acupuncturist, and he became known as the 'one point' acupuncturist. Because he only ever used one point at the crown of the head, to treat everything. I like this as a metaphor too, because it doesn't matter where you enter. You just enter the equation, with the right mindset, and start to heal the distortions.
In a world where most people have never been listened to at all, (Listening is a very rare skill, requiring much practice), this is fundamental.
When someone keeps telling the same story, it's because they haven't felt heard. And that's no surprise, because most people aren't capable of listening. So the odds that a story well-told lands on ears perked up for deep listening are pretty low.
Well, you're in the vicinity of that possibility now. Where's the urgency?
You don't have that much longer to live. I mean, life is precious, and we tend to keep pushing things off into the 'forever' distant future. When you want to do something 'someday', remember... 'someday' never comes. Because when it does, you'll push it off again to another 'someday.'
So, asking 'how much longer do I want to live, and what do I want to do with my allotted time?' is a fruitful question. Ask it often.
If you want to make it real, try this... replace someday with a specific timeframe.
'Someday I'll learn Spanish' becomes... 'today I'll learn some Spanish words.' And every morning... 'Today I'll learn some Spanish.' When someday comes, you'll know Spanish. Incremental gains. Similar things happen with 'someday I'll get in shape.'
Return to childhood.
I was coaching someone under a tree once. He owned a chain of elderly homes and was looking for new inspiration. Also, he had a 3 year old and they were having difficulties connecting. And he'd had to flee the country of his birth in the middle East because of a war. He'd never gotten to play as a child. 'Someday I'll play.' So we cleared some of that, just through analyzing the conversation in a way that it has never been analyzed. And entering the point of emotion (the only place where dependable change occurs).
What happened next was quite startling.
After sharing with his decased father, he opened his eyes, full of tears and I swear to you, full of such a light his body had never known. And some boys came up to him, I don't know where they came from... and asked him to play soccer.
So, the boys became the divine messengers. The universe was asking him to play again.
So that's our job as facilitators... to summon these divine messengers from the woodwork.
What did he say, do you think?
Love and rapture,
Steven Budden Jr.