Wake Up, Human
Wake Up, Human is an exploration of the native powers of the human being. This podcast examines the ways we humans have become disconnected—from our innate wisdom, from each other, and from the natural world—and explores practical strategies for reconnecting to wholeness. Drop in for information and inspiration to help us reawaken and heal ourselves, our relationships, and our planet.
Wake Up, Human
Ep.19: The Cure for the Pain is In the Pain
What if the very pain you're running from contains the medicine you need? In this vulnerable and deeply personal episode, I dive into the wisdom behind the poet Rumi's profound insight: "The cure for the pain is in the pain."
Pain isn't just something that hurts us—it's a messenger, a signal flare demanding our attention. Yet modern society has conditioned us to numb, avoid, and push through our pain rather than face it directly. This avoidance doesn't make pain disappear; instead, it pushes it into our shadow where it grows heavier and more burdensome, unconsciously driving our behaviors and sabotaging our wellbeing.
Drawing from my own raw, recent experience with betrayal, I share how a devastating breakup forced me to confront not only the immediate wound but decades of unprocessed anger, grief, and fear. The journey through this pain reinforced to me that true healing doesn't come from circumventing pain, but from moving consciously through it.
When we have the courage to walk into the fire of our hurt, we don't just burn through what's been weighing us down—we reclaim the parts of ourselves we've hidden away, becoming more integrated and whole along the way.
Are you ready to stop running from what hurts? Me, too. Let's journey forth together, knowing that our deepest wounds might contain our most profound medicine.
Hello everyone, and welcome to episode 19 of the Wake Up Human podcast. I'm your host, shannon Wills, and in this episode I'm going to be talking about a painful subject, namely pain itself. I'm going to be talking about our relationship to pain and how being in right relationship to pain can heal us rather than harm us, and it can help us become more whole rather than tear us apart. So if you or someone you love is in pain or has been in pain ever, you might want to listen to this episode, and I hope you will See you on the inside. And I hope you will See you on the inside. Welcome to the Wake Up Human podcast. I'm Shannon Wills, a curious wanderer with a passion for digging into life's mysteries and mining them for wisdom to apply to our modern lives. This podcast explores the ways we humans have become disconnected from our native ways of knowing what we have lost and what we can gain by coming back into wholeness. Each episode will explore this theme of reconnecting with our innate human power in order to heal ourselves, our relationships and our planet. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let's jump into the latest installment of Wake Up Human. Hi everyone, and welcome to this episode. Cure for the Pain is in the Pain. The Cure for the Pain is in the Pain. I was going to talk about something else this week. I had planned to talk about the eagle and the condor prophecy, which is something that I'm excited to share about. I learned some things about it on my recent trip to Ecuador from my teacher there, and I want to share that with you. However, this other topic came up for me today, and I'm going to honor these hits of intuition. When something comes to me and really wants to be spoken, I want to speak that. I don't want to go with my plan, I want to go with my gut, and my gut is telling me I'm going to talk about pain today and the eagle and the condor will come next week, so I hope you'll come back and join me for that episode. Okay, so the cure for the pain is in the pain. This is a quote by Rumi, the 13th century Sufi mystic and poet, who you may or may not be familiar with. Rumi was born in what is now Afghanistan, he wrote in Persian and he is one of the most beloved poets in the world. And he's one of the most beloved poets in the world. Now this quote by him the cure for the pain is in the pain. I'm not entirely clear that this is the actual quote from Rumi, and I'll say something about that later on today, but it sounds. It's really impactful, isn't it? The cure for the pain is in the pain, and it's impactful in a way that inspired me to want to speak about it.
Shannon W.:So I want to start by just asking the question what is pain? And the quick and easy answer to that is pain is something that hurts us. Pain can be physical, spiritual, emotional, psychological or a combination of those, but it's something that hurts us. And pain is also, if we look at it biologically, pain is a safety mechanism. It's telling us when we feel pain. It's telling us that there is something wrong, that there's something happening that needs our attention. Whether that's pain in a body part in our knee right, we've got an injury and the body is saying, hey, look at me, there's something wrong. We need attention. And also emotional pain or psychological or spiritual pain. If something is really eating at us, something is really hurting us, something's keeping us up, something is triggering, something inside of us that hurts, that's also calling us to say, hey, there's something here. That needs to be looked at. And we humans can be pretty good at ignoring pain, both physical pain and psycho, emotional, spiritual pain. We can push it down and pretend it's not there and just keep moving on. And so the first thing I want to say is, when we look at the cure for the pain being in the pain, well, if we're going to explore this topic, we need to first address that pain is something that we need to look at, that it's trying to tell us something and that that something is important.
Shannon W.:So, before I start talking about what I wanted to share about pain and this quote, I wanted to just think a minute about well, what would Rumi have thought, if you know, if he says the cure for the pain is in the pain, and he did say something, at least he said something very like this for the pain is in the pain, and he did say something, at least he said something very like this. What did he mean by that? And I don't know, because I'm not Rumi, but in the bit that I know about him, I just want to mention this that Rumi was a God-seeking poet, he was a Sufi and he was seeking union with his beloved, with God, and you can read the depth of that desire in his poetry. And something that Rumi spoke about a lot was the joy and the dance of seeking his beloved and the role that love played in that, that he was seeking the beloved through love, that he was explicitly saying that love is oneness with God. And what I pick up in all of that is that he's speaking about.
Shannon W.:When he speaks about any kind of cure, he's talking about wholeness and oneness, and so it makes sense that he would say something like the cure for the pain is in the pain, because the pain of seeking God, the pain of being separate from God, the pain of being separate from his source, it's showing him what's hurting him, it's the separation, and so by looking at that pain and recognizing where it's coming from, he can recognize what the cure would be. Ah, my beloved, I seek you, my beloved, make me one with you. Does that make sense? That he's seeing, by looking at his pain, he's recognizing what the cure for the pain might be. This is a very rudimentary explanation of what Rumi might have been trying to express here. I think he was probably expressing something even more deep and profound.
Shannon W.:But if we just look at this idea that by looking at the pain we can recognize what the cure for the pain might be. So, for example, if I've got a painful knee and I'm looking at my painful knee like I'm allowing myself to feel that painful knee right, what might be the cure for that pain? The cure for the pain isn't taking a hammer and hitting my knee. It isn't pretending that my knee doesn't hurt. It isn't yelling at my knee, you know. It's finding a way to treat the pain in the knee. It sounds so obvious, doesn't it? But we can be in pain and we can try going all different directions around that pain. Rather than actually looking at the pain and what might truly practically resolve it, we'll throw our pain on someone else with our emotions, we'll pretend it's not there, we'll stuff it down, we'll just run around on the treadmill of life and let the pain just fester and boil and build and become infected. And that's true for physical pain, again, as well as psychological, emotional or spiritual pain. So when we talk about, the cure for pain is in the pain.
Shannon W.:A couple of things came to my mind. If we think about, what does that look like in today's world? And one of the things that came to my mind was the I believe it's Winston Churchill quote if you're going through hell, keep on going. We do have this idea in our culture, in our Western culture, that we can go into the pain and go through the pain in order to get to the other side of it, and I've also heard a quote recently that said something like when we go through it, we grow through it. So, yeah, when we go through it, we grow through it.
Shannon W.:I want to be careful not to equate this with the idea that, oh, suffering is a good thing. If you're suffering right now, if you're in pain, let's just look at how you're growing through that. Let's just look at the silver lining of that, all the good that can come from that. No, when we're in pain, we're in pain, and sometimes we just need to be recognized that we're in pain. However, this idea that going through the pain, into the pain, and that there is growth on the other side, that idea of growth can be a little bit like the idea of cure right, that if we go through something, then we're going to reconnect on the other side with the other side of that trajectory. Like what did that lead us to? Whereas if we run from the pain or hide from the pain, or try to go around the pain, or stop in the middle of the pain and freeze, all kinds of other things can happen that may actually cause that pain to get stuck or to get hidden or to become fragmented within us.
Shannon W.:I do want to mention here, just so it's being named, that our modern Western culture we are one of the only cultures that doesn't view pain and suffering as a means of transformation, as a means of, say, engaging with ourselves in challenging ways to grow, through initiations, through rites of passage or just through that cultural understanding that pain or suffering does not immediately equate with something negative or something that needs to be avoided. I mean, we do have some narratives in our culture that suggest, you know, no pain, no gain, type of narratives, but in general though, our culture really is pain shy. We want to take the aspirin rather than have the headache, and that may not be serving us when it comes to truly resolving the pain, not just the pain of the moment, but the pain that's underlying it as well. So I had this teacher, actually beloved teacher of Qigong, my teacher Alex Fung. He is the founder of the Taoist Center in Oakland, california, and I studied with him for several years and one of the things that he taught that was really instructive to me was that he was also an acupuncturist and he was a very skilled and very experienced in the healing arts in relation to the physical and the spiritual body, and one of the things that he talked about was in the physical body, if you have a pain point, the first thing to do with that pain point is to be aware of it. You have to know that it's painful, and so you know. He would have us actually touch into all the different points on our body, all the different acupressure, acupuncture points on the body. And when we find one that is extra tender, quite painful, what do you do with that? Well, first you recognize oh, that part is painful, so you bring it into your awareness Already. By bringing it into awareness, it becomes more whole in our consciousness, like, oh, I can do something about it, now that I'm recognizing it's there, I'm not blind to it.
Shannon W.:And then what he would say is you actually want to in order to address that pain? You don't go all around that pain. He would say, you know, you put your finger or your thumb right into that pain point. You just stick it in there and you push on it. And as you push on it, yes, it's going to hurt and you hold it and you look at it and you feel it. And by pushing on that pain point, the pain point receives the energy of your attention and of your thumb or your finger, physically, and that energy rushes to the point of the pain. And when it gets to the point of the pain, it starts working on the point of the pain, especially if you're sort of digging in and moving around and really looking at it, and then it can start to disperse and it really does. And you can actually try this right now. If you find a spot on your body, just try. You know, maybe the areas around your hands, forearms or elbows, those can be easy to reach with your fingers. Press around until you find a pain point and then just push on that. I'm not trying to injure yourself, but just push on it with a reasonable amount of pressure and hold it there and keep your awareness on it and watch what happens. The pain will start to move and sometimes the pain can dissipate and lessen all by itself just like that. And sometimes it needs repeat sessions, you know pressure sessions.
Shannon W.:So there's a couple of lessons in this, I guess, or something I want to point out. First of all, if we don't see the pain, we can't address it. I think I already said that and that by going into it, by actually pushing into it, addressing it, seeing it, that really is the way. It's not just a poetic idea and it's not just an interesting frame to use, like the Churchill quote, for example. I think he really meant that to be true. I don't think he meant that tongue in cheek. And it doesn't mean push through the pain either. It's like the opposite of that. Pushing through the pain is something we I kind of already touched on, which is in our culture. We can actually have the pain and say, nah, I'm going to keep on going through it, it's injuring me, I have an injury and I'm going to keep on doing what I'm doing without addressing the injury. That is pushing through the pain and that can A make the injury worse.
Shannon W.:As we all know, if you've got something strained in your knee and you keep pushing it, pushing it, pushing it, you might pop an ACL, you might you know, you might injure your knee somehow. And same thing with our emotional selves right. If we've got something that's really bothering us, let's say it's, and this isn't as obvious. But let's say it's grief, or let's say it's anger, or let's say it's fear, and we just keep pushing, pushing, pushing and we don't see that Guess what? That grief, that anger, that fear it is building up in us. It's not just going away because we're choosing not to look at it. It's building up in us and just going away because we're choosing not to look at it. It's building up in us, and so the healthy thing to do, then, is to turn our attention and to actually be able to look at that. And, like I said, that's not as easy to see as the pain in our knee sometimes, especially if we're really good at avoiding looking at our emotions. And how many of us have been programmed and trained really, really well to be in our thoughts and not our feelings and emotions? So if we're someone who is not used to giving attention to our emotions, okay, well, it's probably not our fault, and we need to learn how to look at our emotions. Just the same way we need to look at our knee and get ourselves to a doctor.
Shannon W.:So I want to talk about something that happened in my personal life, and the reason I want to do this is because, a it's instructive for this conversation and, b because it's a big deal in my life and it's been tough and I want to um, it's been something that's been painful for me and in order for me to move through it, I have had to look at it and I've had to look at me really, really deeply. So a couple of months ago six months ago, no, not even six months ago, five months ago my partner came to me one morning and he said to me I'm basically I'm leaving you and I'm leaving you for someone else, and the someone else he decided to leave me for was someone who was my friend. I thought she was my friend for years and they decided behind my back that if he left me, that she would be with him, and so he did. And I'm not here to throw either one of them under the bus with this conversation, but I'm speaking what happened and that's the facts right there, so that I can explain that when that happened to me, the fallout from that, the emotional fallout from that, it was not the worst thing that ever happened to me. Worse things have happened to me objectively in my life. However, it was bar none the most painful thing that I have ever been through emotionally.
Shannon W.:And in the process of moving through the emotional pain of that betrayal, I have seen not only the pain of that betrayal come up, but I have seen, I've been forced to see, so many aspects of myself that I had not seen before. Things I was just running right past, things, I was ignoring things I kind of knew about, but I was just, you know, not giving them priority or importance. Anger that has been inside me for many, many years. Grief that has been inside me for many years that has not been addressed. Fear all kinds of fears that were triggered and touched and woken up by suddenly my partner leaving and the foundation coming out from under my feet and abandonment stories. We've all got things right, we've all got things, and I really saw a lot come up and it became very clear to me that if I didn't look at all those things straight in the eye and go through them, they were going to eat me alive. I felt a couple of times like I was going to lose my mind because there was so much coming through so fast, especially the anger so related to this story of mine, this recent experience of mine, which I'm still in, I'm still processing, which is probably why the quote about the cure for pain so quickly caught my attention.
Shannon W.:I just want to say so. It can be so easy when pain comes up that we want to erase the pain. We want the pain to go away because it hurts. Of course we want it to go away. It makes perfect sense, like anything that I can do to make this go away. Can I put it on someone else? Can I hide it? Can I pretend this isn't happening? Can I deny it? Can I suck it up and hold it in.
Shannon W.:But the thing is with pain, by saying that the cure for pain is in the pain, I'm not trying to erase the pain. This whole idea that the pain needs to go away, it's really not helpful. And it's not true, because if we try to sidestep the pain, if we try to go around something that's hurting us, we're not going to actually get away from that. All we're doing is avoiding it, just like we're avoiding that hurt knee. And what happens when we do that? Let's say the pain is in front of me and let's say I just say I'm going to go around this pain, because that's too painful. I don't want to feel that I'm going to go around it and I'm going to just leave it behind me. Well, guess what? It doesn't get left behind me, then it's still with me, but instead of me actively participating with how I want to engage with the pain.
Shannon W.:Now the pain is behind me. Now the pain becomes part of my shadow, but it's still attached to me. And guess what? Now I'm pulling the pain along with me, but I'm no longer looking at it. It's still hurting me, but I'm not in relationship with it to be able to address the hurt. And if I do that, one time I'm pulling that pain behind me, like with my shadow. If I do it again and again and again, then that shadow is getting thicker and heavier and more filled with all of that pain that I didn't look at. And by the time I'm 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, how much pain could I have accumulated and how heavy could that shadow be.
Shannon W.:And if we look at the shadow in, I guess, a Jungian sense or other type of spiritual senses, the shadow is the part of us that we don't see or that is unconsciously guiding our behaviors, and sometimes in very damaging ways to us. It's a part of us that is not actually incorporated into our awareness, that is sequestered off into its own compartment in that area where we don't see it, in the unconscious. And, just as Jung taught in this process that he calls individuation, what we're doing in that process is becoming more whole and becoming more healed by bringing what is in the shadow into the light. So do we want to be dragging around the pain as shadow and adding to it, or do we want to A address the pain that's in front of us so that it doesn't add to the shadow we already have, and then, b we can start to look at what's actually in the shadow, the rest of it and that's where this betrayal that happened to me broke open so many things that not only was a lot of pain right in front of me, but all that shadow stuff that was in there, a whole bunch of things that had just been building up over many, many years, over decades. The lid just blew off of those things and suddenly I'm in the middle of, like, what's in front of me and what's behind me, and I don't even know what's what. I can't even tell what pain came from.
Shannon W.:Where have any of you ever been in a situation like this where something is so painful you don't even know where the pain is even coming from? If you wanted to fight that pain, if you wanted to be Bruce Lee, right then, and just go ninja on the pain. The pain would be like your enemies all around you I don't even really want to call it an enemy, but your adversaries all around you coming from all different directions, right like you can imagine bruce lee and he's doing drop kicks and he's spinning and he's doing 360 and he's trying to get all those guys at once. That's what this has felt like, and I'm sure some of you guys can probably relate so again. So in the pain is like we're in the pain. This thing is happening and we might be it might be a little pain, or we might be totally underwater with that pain. The pain might be the ocean and we might be drowning in it.
Shannon W.:Either way, moving toward the cure for pain by being in the pain means that we're looking into it, we're letting ourselves swim in that, we're letting ourselves poke it and we're allowing ourselves to witness it, acknowledge it, and then the goal is to release it, because when we hold on to it, even if it becomes our shadow, it weighs us down. And even if it doesn't become our shadow, it hurts us. We can hold it. We can hold it as hatred, we can hold it as resentment, we can hold it as fear that's keeping us from showing up fully as ourselves. We can hold it as depression. It can pull us down into a place where just things feel like they're wrong and we don't even know what it is. We don't even know why things feel wrong, we just know that they do so into the pain.
Shannon W.:Well, one way I've talked about this is that we want to allow ourselves to acknowledge it, and if we're talking about emotional pain or thoughts, one thing that we can do that can be really helpful is to name them. So if I'm in a place where emotion has just taken over me, we can call this flooding like I'm flooded with an emotion. When I become flooded with an emotion, let's say it's anger, even if I'm screaming it out. If I can see it and I can name it, I can say anger, I am angry. Or if I'm sad, like if sadness has overwhelmed me, I'm flooded with sadness, I'm flooded with fear. I can say sadness, this is sadness, this is sadness. I'm naming this sadness, I'm naming this fear. This is fear.
Shannon W.:What that does, is it? First of all, it allows us to distance ourselves a bit from the experience of the flooding, not that it's going to take it away from us. We're still, maybe, in the experience, the actual physiological experience of that emotion. So by naming it, it can take that a little bit of the edge off of it. It can take some of the power away from it, because by naming it, we recognize that it's not us. I'm not anger, this is anger in me. I am not fear, I'm not afraid, I'm not sad, like I'm not that emotion. I am me, I am Shannon and this emotion is flooding me.
Shannon W.:This emotion is coming upon me and I can distance myself from it and recognize that the emotion isn't going to stay with me. I can breathe through it, I can walk through it, I can talk through it and I can release it, because this is what's important. And by ignoring it we're not releasing it. By letting it flood us, we're not releasing it, we're actually feeding it Like, oh, it's flooding me, I'm going to get angrier and angrier and angrier and I'm going to get madder at that person and I'm going to start thinking terrible thoughts about things. And then I'm feeding it and I'm getting more get madder at that person and I'm going to start thinking terrible thoughts about things. And then I'm feeding it and I'm getting more upset and the emotion is becoming stronger in me and then if I don't release that, then the part of the emotion that's in the shadow is even stronger. So releasing it can look like maybe I also besides walking through it, breathing through it, screaming through it, throwing things that aren't going to, you know, break things or hurt anybody physical actions of release can be incredible.
Shannon W.:I went to a shamanic practitioner when I was in Ecuador. I did a lot of things, of things in Ecuador that I want to share with you, but one of the things I went to I will share with you because it's relevant to this. I went to a shamanic practitioner there who did what he called a shamanic massage, and it was the combination of talking a bit about my situation and then performing a sort of a shamanic energy healing on me. At the same time as doing this, what he would call a massage manipulating the energy in my body, physically manipulating my body and the energy to move things through. And I will tell you, without going into detail, about the session. He was very clear with me that what I was looking for was release, because it was very clear that I was carrying so much anger and so much sadness and that what I needed to do was release it. And he just said to me if you need to scream, scream. If you need to cry, cry, this is the space for it. I'm here holding space for you. Yes, that's vulnerable.
Shannon W.:I'm not saying that that was easy and I'm not saying that it would be easy for everyone, but I will tell you that I took his instruction and, as I was going through the healing process and all the massage, I screamed and screamed and screamed. So much anger, so much fury, all the resentment, all the sadness, all the desperation. I cried it and I screamed it and I cried it and I screamed it. And on the other side of that crying and that screaming, one thing happened is I lost my voice for a couple of days, which makes sense. But what happened was I really physically released something. I also emotionally released so much of what I was holding, and it was profound. And what's really sticking with me is yes, the talking, yes, the actual healing.
Shannon W.:But it was my willingness to let go that was the real healing, in addition to being held in that space and being safe to do it. I called in the courage that I needed to just scream and cry my heart out in front of another person, a stranger, and in the days and weeks to follow, I physically felt that a space in me had been opened up. So I'm not going to say too much more about it, because I'm not meaning this conversation to be about a shamanic healing. What I'm wanting it to be about, what I'm wanting to highlight, is the power of purging, the power of letting go. We can think of releasing as purging something that is inside of us, that is hurting us, and we need to get it out. And when we do get it out, we've seen it, so we can integrate it back into us, which makes us more whole in ourself, more aware of who we are and what's been within us, and it also makes us more clear because something that has been sequestered away and hidden and sort of taking up space in our psyche and our energy, that space is now free, that space is now opened up for us to be able to use that energy for other things in our life. So we can think about this in terms of the physical body as well. So, if we have a knee injury and we're not addressing it or we're ignoring it or we don't even really realize it because we're not paying attention to our body, so what would releasing it be in this case? Well, I want to put out an idea and you can see what you think about this.
Shannon W.:But I think that releasing this, in the case of needing to get something healed that we're not seeing, I think that could actually be related to seeing it and then releasing the avoidance of it, because the avoidance can actually be that shadow. We don't feel we have time, we don't trust doctors, we're concerned, we're worried, we're afraid that if we go in and ask about our knee, they're going to tell us that something really bad is happening. We think, well, if I go in and have my knee looked at, I might end up having a real injury and that's going to immobilize me and I won't be able to do my job, like all these kind of fears and subconscious ponderings can be behind that. And so we, in order to really address our pain, we need to be willing to release the avoidance and you know it's.
Shannon W.:I think that avoidance can also be part of our programming In the world we live in, where we are programmed from a very young age to, first of all, work hard, don't let them see you cry. Pull yourself up when you're down, be productive, get things done and go fast. Right. Things move really fast. There's so much to do. Life is so full. We don't have time to stop and look around and slow down and tend to ourselves, let alone do something uncomfortable like taking time to look deeply into our pain.
Shannon W.:No wonder we have a whole bunch of stuff inside of us that we've never looked at, and we're also, in our culture, programmed so much to be in our heads and to try to solve things with our heads. So, first of all, we're in our heads, so we're not feeling, maybe, what our heart is saying to us, or maybe we're not recognizing what our body is saying to us. We may we're not recognizing what our body is saying to us, we may not even really know how to be embodied, and so we try to solve problems with our minds but our mind. If our mind is hiding the shadow from us, our mind will miss what the problem even is. And this is another reason why the cure for the pain is in the pain. Because if there's something that's painful and we're just ruminating about it in our head, but what's actually happening and painful is in our body or in our emotions or in our spirit, unless the different parts of us are integrated and we're aware with our mind of our body and emotions and spirit, our head is not going to know where to find the pain. We're going to miss that. The pain is even there and it's just going to keep on hurting us.
Shannon W.:So a couple of other practices that we could try for working through pain is if something's hurting us and we're able to recognize it, one thing is journaling, writing it out, writing it out, writing out what's happening. This is getting it out of us and it's processing it out of our brain. It's processing it out of our thoughts. It's letting the thoughts have their way without ruminating, so we're sort of splattering it on the page, so it's not stuck in our mind anymore. And we can also do that hopefully not in a splattering way, but we can talk about it. We can talk to a friend or a family member or someone who's supportive and someone who will hold us lovingly, without judgment, and that we can share what's actually going on for us. That's also releasing the pain. It's another way of releasing and it's doing it more from yes, we're using words and we're in a headspace, but it also, if we're with a person who we trust and we're in a loving, accepting space. That's also bringing the experience of the pain down into our hearts, and it can be bringing it into our physical body space as well, but definitely into our hearts, where it can be processed in a different way, and I think this is the way that Rumi would have been walking through it too. He would have been walking into the pain through his heart. I don't think he's talking about journaling, but in our modern day, journaling can be an excellent tool.
Shannon W.:Another practice that we can really look into is embodiment learning how to be in our body. There are lots of embodiment practices, everything from breath work and yoga to somatic, experiencing type of therapy work that brings us into our body and just teaches us. If you look up embodiment or look up somatic work, it's all about teaching us to get back into our bodies and to recognize our bodies as a source of wisdom and information. You know that our body is actually sending signals to our brain. It's a conversation, consciousness. Our consciousness is a conversation between body, mind and spirit, spirit. It's not sequestered in our brain. And so if we want to be whole, if we want to be conscious of our pain or anything else it, it needs to be a mind-body-spirit process. That can't be done with the mind, I guarantee you, it can't be done with the mind or the mind alone.
Shannon W.:My screaming and my crying and the release of what I was holding really tightly, that would not have happened if I was just thinking about it. That was a full body release. It came through my voice, a lot of it, but it wasn't my voice, it was my whole body that was screaming. So don't be afraid to go somewhere and scream and scream and cry and yell and do whatever you need to be in the pain, so the pain doesn't have to keep being in you. And then I do want to say and this is really giving a nod back to Rumi this isn't about just screaming out our pain, it's about lovingly holding ourselves into and through a healing process, recognizing that releasing our pain and going through our pain is love. It's loving ourselves, inviting ourselves back into wholeness and it's inviting ourselves back into relationship with the world around us. Because when we get closed off in pain whether it's physical, emotional around us, because when we get closed off in pain, whether it's physical, emotional, whatever it is, we're actually closing ourselves off from the world.
Shannon W.:Think about if you have that knee injury and somebody invites you for a bike ride. You're not going to go on the bike ride if your knee is hurting you, really hurting you, because you're going to want to protect it. And one of the, I guess, ironic things about walking into pain, walking into that fire, is that it does ask us to lovingly request that protector to stand aside a bit. Now, yeah, we want the protector to protect our knee when that's the reasonable thing to do. We want the protector to protect our knee when that's the reasonable thing to do. But sometimes the protector, especially in the case of emotional or spiritual wounds, can be protecting something so strongly that it's keeping it from healing. So by protecting from further pain, it's also protecting from the cure.
Shannon W.:We need to be able to pull the band-aid off of that wound that's not being looked at. We need to be able to bring it into the light of awareness, like the sunlight, the air. Like a wound doesn't heal if it's just covered up and pushed inside. It becomes an abscess and it grows and it makes us sick. So we need to pull that band-aid off. And we know right what does that mean culturally, in our society. Pulling the bandaid off means it's going to hurt. Yes, it is going to hurt. Yes, the wound is going to be exposed. And so we want to have some protective measures. Of course we don't want to just go and grab a handful of dirt and shove it into that wound. Grab a handful of dirt and shove it into that wound, or we don't want to put ourselves in relationship with someone who is going to that person is somehow going to trigger the wound being re -injured.
Shannon W.:So, for example, my partner. After he left, I kept trying to have conversations with him just to figure out what had gone on, just to try to understand, just to try to be heard, just to try to be seen in my pain. And I tried that and every time I tried it it ended up hurting me more because he just wasn't there for that. In a lot of different ways. And so in my attempt to reach toward healing, to go toward the pain and to reach toward healing. That wasn't working, because every time I saw him I felt like all of the or tried to talk to him, I felt like salt was being shoved into my wound or like the knife was being stuck in again and twisted around Like don that that's not going into the pain, that's just re-injuring ourselves unnecessarily. So going into the pain doesn't mean sticking the knife in again and again, but it does mean opening it up in safe spaces and safe ways so that it can heal.
Shannon W.:So one last thing I just wanted to say. You know, I mentioned at the beginning that I'm not entirely sure that this quote is exactly what Rumi said. I did not find the quote. The cure for the pain is in the pain, and I'm kind of a stickler for knowing where quotes actually come from and if something was actually said and I want to share.
Shannon W.:I did find a poem by Rumi. It's called Until You've Found Pain and the first two lines of the poem are this Until you've found pain, you won't reach the cure. Until you've found pain, you won't reach the cure. Until you've given up life, you won't unite with the Supreme Soul. So when I found this poem I thought you know I think I'm on the right track with my thoughts around Rumi. He is looking for unification with the Supreme Soul.
Shannon W.:Now I'm not going to take the time to unpack all of that, but I do want to flag these words that until you have found pain, you won't reach the cure. Now for Rumi this is a very important for him where he says until you've given up life, you won't unite with the supreme soul. This goes back to that deep desire for union with God that infuses all of Rumi's poetry. So here what I think he's saying is that the cure for him is unification with the supreme soul and until he's found pain, until he has felt the pain, been with the pain, that unification will not come.
Shannon W.:And for us we can translate that that, whatever the deepest desire we have, that is our cure. Whatever, that place of peace and connection and fullness and wholeness and feeling that our life, the joy of being alive, that's the cure. And as long as our pain is stuck inside our shadow, the cure is in our shadow too. So let's start digging into those shadows, let's do it in a conscious and loving way and let's pull ourselves back together so we ourselves can be a part of the cure. Remember, pain and suffering are part of being human and if we can embrace and accept that, we're embracing and accepting ourselves. Week. Much love to you. Thank you so much for spending time with me. I'm grateful for you and I wish you peace, clarity and wakefulness. Bye for now.