Unlink Your Pain From Its Story

Perhaps you are working through a tough story. A story of loss, victimhood, shame, craving, betrayal, abuse. It hurts. So your mind keeps repeating the story in hope of finding some relief. And you assume, as we all do, that by repeating the story in your mind, or to someone who is listening, and you keep acting it out in your body, you will eventually change the ending...

Yet it never changes, does it? You think the story is over. Then something happens in the world that triggers your outrage. And if something triggers your out-rage, the in-rage must already be there, just waiting to be triggered.

Every time you tell the story, or re-act it, you get even more chained to the past in an endless loop. This is the wheel of karma.



Is there freedom from the wheel, freedom from the story? Yes. This is the Good News. Yet freedom from the past never lies in a higher world, a savior, an esoteric doctrine. Freedom from the past lies in one place only: the present moment. The present moment is a bottomless well of healing.

Your story is a boat of pain, a vehicle of suffering. But please observe: while the story is always in the past, the pain is in the present. That is why, every time you repeat the story, it feels so real. You are feeling pain in the present, through the images of the past, held together by a narrative in the mind.

Now here is the open secret: Instead of repeating the story of the past over and over, just enter its pain. Enter the pain so deeply that the story drops away, and only the pain remains. Then you are in the present, not with any story, but with the living energy of your trauma. You are ripe for healing.

Do not resist the pain. Just cease to tell a story about. Breathe through the pain and unlink it from any image in the memory. Feel the pain as nameless sensation. Let it swallow you in its darkest void. This is courage.

If you follow your pain all the way into the void, remaining present to it without a story, something wondrous and graceful happens. And it happens in the Now, without the slightest reference to the past. When you drop the story of your pain, your pain blossoms into pure energy.

Now your suffering flowers into something that is no longer suffering, something dynamic that is no longer stuck in a mental repetition of the past, no longer bound to a story. Your pain is free energy.

Are you listening? It is not simply that you are free, but that your pain is free! In fact, you are free because you pain is free of its story. You can breathe it out.

Let your pain flower into the sparkling energy of Presence, the radiance of pure awareness. Offer it through tears, through laughter, through a breath of wonder.