“Feeling is the antithesis of pain…the more pain one feels, the less pain one suffers.”
~ Arthur Janov
I was a poet. I was a writer. Many things happened, and the poet in me died. The writer in me still lives on.
Should I mourn the death of the poet, or celebrate the life of the writer?
Both different yet the same for me. Life and death. Pain and joy. Tears and laughter…
I cannot compartmentalize.
I genuinely feel all of it – life, death, pain, joy!
But…
When I was in corporate life, I was condemned for not being able to compartmentalize.
“Don’t bring your emotions to work,” my bosses would say.
“How is that possible,” I would wonder.
How can a person feel something and then not feel anything?
How is it possible to be one person at work and yet another person at home?
Isn’t who you are as a person reflected in all aspects of your life?
I was befuddled. I was rebuked and shamed and embarrassed for being over-emotional. Either I was too sensitive, or I was too hot to handle… too aggressive, too arrogant. I was too much for everyone. In order to be accepted, I unconsciously made myself “smaller.”
By being ME, by being a top performer in the country, by being vocal about things… offended people, made people insecure, made them feel small. So I allowed myself to become “small.” I lost was my grandeur.
Little did I know that it was their problem and not mine.
I did not know how to compartmentalize, be diplomatic, or shun my emotions.
But I had to survive in the corporate world. I had to make a living. I was going through the toughest challenges of my life back then. Having married at 31, only to realize within the 2nd day of the marriage that the guy was a fraud. Only to discover that my family did not want me back. I realized, if I have to survive, I needed money. I only had Rs. 4000/- in my bank account and forget the money for making a deposit, I did not even have money for rent.
I had to survive. I had to fight my way through. And I had to succumb to the ‘conditions’ of the society.
So, what happened?
The creative part of me, the bubbly cheerful part of me went away. It became suppressed. A practical Neelam emerged; she wanted everything to be logical. Everything had to make sense.
Wounds? Who had time for wounds? The strength and the courage required for survival left no energy for “feeling” my wounds and pain. Be it betrayal, be it being abandoned and not supported by family or be it anything else.
I just needed to survive, needed strength to cope in a corporate environment, which was not me at all. Needed courage to fight a court case all alone against the betrayal.
How could the poetic/dreamy part of me have survived back then? If it did, I would have felt soooo much pain that I would have probably committed suicide.
So the practical/courageous part which came up was a survival mechanism to cope with the cruel world.
There was no way to compartmentalize. Some parts had to die or become disowned for other parts of me to survive.
The betrayal from marriage, the abandoned betrayal from family, was too much to bear.
And yet the ‘whole’ was not whole because it was torn apart and fragmented.
This lasted for good 10-12 years. What was the end result? A massive heart wall. This heart wall protected me from pain and hurt. But it took away my vulnerability, and the ability to fully feel, to feel ever so deeply.
With my advent into the spiritual path, the pieces of these puzzles of my life have started coming together. Be it my shamanic warrior path or Phoenix or dreamwork or working with and owning the feminine, I had an opening and allowed to feel all my emotions fully. I took ownership of the pain and would not be threatened by it again.
When our creative self is disowned, we lose the potential to birth and manifest and create the life that we seek. No matter that my physical body became a storehouse of aches and pains, IBS, ton of digestive issues, allergies, and high blood pressure.
Later, when I learned to connect to these parts and connect to my body, I discovered that these aches and pains were desires unfulfilled. They were parts of me screaming to bring to life things that I have always wanted to birth, but couldn’t.
Becoming the Phoenix was a life-changing platform and experience for me. It gave me an opportunity to look at these parts, to look at the wounding and the pain, and gave me a chance to fully feel my pain and own these parts which were hiding for so long.
Of course, who wants to feel our pain so fully? We all want to believe, “Oh, I have resolved my problems; I’ve moved ahead in life. My life has transformed. So I have healed. There is no need to look back at my past or feel my pain again. It was enough that I went through those times, and now it is over. I have ‘released’ it.”
What an illusion! How can we release our pain until we allow ourselves to fully ‘feel’ the pain?
Many times, during my quest, I would ask, “I have done so much work, why this guidance again and again about letting go of the past? I am not pained by it anymore…I have done so much forgiveness…I have done so much work.”
Only later did I understand, unless we live out our emotions fully, and allow ourselves to feel them in all totality without the slightest urge or need to heal them or release them, until then, emotional clearing or healing is not possible.
So we don’t have to release the pain. Or numb it. We have to allow ourselves to look at it and own it. Pain, like any other emotions, looks for acknowledgment.
Don’t heal the pain. FEEL the pain.
A-ho!