What are the Payoffs for Staying Stuck?
Hi, this is Anna. Today I’m going to talk about the pay-offs of staying sick. I mentioned in the last segment that the mental energy field interacts with our struggles and our pain often by creating rules and restrictions. It’s “learned its lesson” from what happened to us in the past and it’s trying to prevent us from making the same mistake again. All of these restrictions and rules keep us on a particular path – the straight and narrow path.
But another way that the mental energy field interacts with pain is by making meaning of it, and creating stories around it, and even sometimes establishing our identity around it.
Making Meaning of Pain
This is how that might happen. Let’s say you’re a person who, in your childhood, struggled with sexual or physical abuse. As a consequence of your growing up in that situation, you develop certain attributes which are really positive attributes – such as resilience and strength and compassion.
The mental energy field might identify you as a “survivor.” Inside the word “survivor” you have all of these positive attributes accounted for, but by virtue of the identity “survivor” you also have the pain still alive and still stuck with you. The mental energy field does not know how to separate the pain from the positive attributes. So when you’re thinking about spiritual healing, and that’s releasing the pain, on the mental level you can be very fearful that if you lose the pain you lose the benefits – which are now enriching your life and with which you are enriching other people’s lives. You may decide it’s better to hold onto pain so I can hold onto these attributes.
But Things are Different on the Spiritual Field
That is a particular paradigm that is in the mental field, which isn’t true on the spiritual field. When I say that I mean that your positive attributes that you’ve already earned are yours, and you don’t need the pain any longer to hold onto them. In fact your positive attributes will function much more powerfully when they’re not attached to the pain.
But that is something you don’t know on the mental level until you do it. So it may feel too risky to do the spiritual healing process, if you’re afraid you’re going to lose these positive characteristics.
Supporting Communities
Another complication that we find with spiritual healing is that we often have communities that are formed around our struggles and our pain. We have support groups for addictions, for abuse survivors, and for people who are struggling with cancer. Those communities can be very close-knit and very cemented because of our common experience of struggle.
Even families can be like that. If a family has a common experience – of poverty or abuse or addiction – that can really cause a lot of connection and a feeling of belonging in that family. To remove that pain or that struggle means that your relationship to that community will change. You might actually lose that community altogether because you no longer fit in.
Humans are social creatures, so we can’t underestimate how important it is for us to have that social connection. It might be enough to think, maybe spiritual healing is possible but I’m going to lose this potentially. And that’s really important to me and I don’t want to lose that.
You Decide!
The truth is, only you can decide where you are in your life and what makes sense for you. For someone to choose to stay where they are, where they have social connection – where they are doing good in the world and are feeling positive about their lives – even if that means you’re holding onto pain, I would say that is a perfectly valid choice. And you should be able to own that and honor that.
Like, “Maybe a different life is possible, but I don’t want that other life. I want this one, in this current situation, with these current limitations and these current blessings.” That’s something we can all own.
But if you’re someone who does feel led to something different – who feels a little bit too restricted – and what you really want to do is on the other side of the healing, it’s really important to be able to employ a tool which I’m going to talk about in the next segment. Because if you can’t employ this tool then you can’t build up enough momentum to break free of your current situation. The next segment is called, “Imagination As Your Escape Hatch.” I hope you’ll join me for that one. Bye!
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