Let Go of Pain as Your Self Identity

To build an identity on past pain is a dreadful limitation.
-Eckhart Tolle

Hmm! On this topic of letting go in order to achieve healing...we go on to understanding the need to let go of our identity of self that we cling to in that little bag of ashes. 

Letting Go of the Idea of self as a carrier of pain

As the merchant kept his pain and grief around his neck in order to understand who he was through his suffering...many of us do the same.  We cling to past pain, memories and emotions to explain who we are. "I can't be happy because this or that happened."

Trauma exists.  Terrible things happen in this world.  We get hurt by others and sometime viciously so.  When humanity is so unconscious and so unaware of what it is doing...there is bound to be suffering and pain inflicted and received. We are not going to get through Life without pain.  That is a given.

But we do not need to keep the pain around our necks like dog tags that define and identify. We are not our pain.  We are not our thoughts, not our emotions, not what it is happening around us.  We are the silence and the stillness in which these things pass through.

Lost in Pain

Being lost in the foreground of our experience is a normal state for most humans.  Most of us are so absorbed in the 'seriousness' of our thoughts, feelings and external circumstances we do not notice the background.  Stillness, silence, presence is the back ground.  We are the background.

You are not the accumulation of memory and associated thoughts and emotions.  You are the eternal, timeless state of consciousness which is presence.(Tolle).

Thought is noise and sometimes there is so much thought, so much noise leading to feeling and attachment to external world understanding that we can't hear the silence. Pain adds a greater intensity to that noise because it allows mind to become more important.  It is very easy to become so absorbed in the foreground noise that we become lost in it.

Find the silence Beneath the Noise

Even though we get so busy in our heads that we cannot hear or feel the silence and the stillness...it never goes away.  It is still there. We just need to stop what we are doing and listen for it.

Between the words, and the worldly noise there are gaps that silence comes through.  Make it a point to listen ...to notice those gaps.  The moment you notice silence is the moment you become still inside.

Awareness of outer stillness leads to inner stillness. Awareness of outer silence leads to inner silence.  Why?  Because thought cannot see stillness or hear silence ...only our inner stillness can. when you notice silence and stillness you have gone beyond thought to presence. 

It is there where healing happens.

All is well in my world.

References

Eckhart Tolle (2017) Talk to your Thoughts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yrRHaE_7d4