When was the last time you really felt emotional pain?
Physical pain is something much different from emotional pain. When you feel emotional pain, when you really allow yourself to feel it, it's as though your body is being sucked of all its energy and life.
Emotional pain rips through layers and seems to end up eating at your core. Most often we feel emotional pain in the center of our chest close to our heart or at the pit of our stomach (the gut) which happens to be our second brain.
Most often it takes something completely unexpected, confusing, and impactful to trigger our emotional pain. Something someone said, something someone did or didn't do, a bad choice or a vindictive act. From my own real life experience and in working with others who have suffered emotional pain, the feelings that cause the most pain are rejection, betrayal, deception, loss, disappointment, disallusionment, confusion, and ridicule.
Our emotional pain precedes physical pain. The less we chose to feel our emotions, especially the ones we struggle with, fear, and reject the most, the more our physical pain is inflamed. Traumatic events and situations can cause us to feel such raw emotional pain, that we are left with nothing more than sprit to help guide us out of the downward sprial of confusion, hurt, and suffering.
Feeling hurt is part of life. Hurt can sometimes be the best antidote for being able to see things more clearly (with a new lens) and suddenly our perspective shifts and changes. What we thought to believe as real, wasn't ever real at all. Who we thought we knew well, turned out to be someone completely different. Where we felt our life was headed, was never actually part of the plan.
Raw emotional pain helps us to remember that we are alive in the midst of a circumstance that feels like death. How we come out of these moments of emotional pain and resuscitate teaches us more about ourselves than we can ever imagine. In times where emotional pain is cutting like a knife or scraping up our insides and leaving us concave, we can come back to our source of life with self-compassion:
Step 1: connect with your breath by taking deep inhales and exhales
Step 2: put one hand on your heart, the other on your belly and transmit love to your own self
Step 3: envision something that brings you peace and calm
Step 4: tell yourself over and over, “Everything is going to be okay”
You have the strength to feel your emotional pain, the power to heal it, and the wisdom to understand that true substance comes from suffering. This is called awakening.