Pain and Healing

Our lives are tailor made for our awakening.
-Adyashanti


A year ago today I wrote about healing from the perception of illness and reclaiming that sense of holistic wellness we are all entitled to. Ironically, as I study the Teacher's Manual for ACIM, exactly a year later,  I come into the teaching on healing. I am also experiencing for the first time in a long time another intense bout of physical pain. It kept me awake for much of the night because I struggled against it or fought to 'label and conceptualize' its cause and what I should do about it.

Coincidence?

I see now that the circumstances  for learning are all laid out in front of me like lessons from some exquisite lesson plan. My life or life situation  is tailored made for my awakening.

So I sat with the pain today.  I just sat with it.  I did not struggle against it.  I did not try to analyze it or conceptualize it by diagnosing it or giving it a label (though I could lol).  I didn't create story around it (though part of me really wanted to because I am so addicted to story:). I just sat with it.  I breathed into it.  I allowed it to be whatever it was and I even embraced it.  It was the most remarkable experience to embrace that pain.  There was a true letting go and in that letting go the healing arose.

The pain is still there but I don't give it any value other than pointing to the reality that the true healing that has to occur in me goes beyond the body. All illness and all healing takes place in the mind and realizing that  is what waking up is all about. We are all  given the very unique life circumstances and the learning challenges needed to help us do that.

The acceptance of  sickness is a decision of the mind, for a purpose for which it would use the body, is the basis of healing...A patient decides this is so, and he recovers...Who is the physician? Only the mind of the patient himself.   ACIM:TM:II:2:1-6

All is well!