At a very critical moment in my life, I learned the more I stayed in my head to figure things out and ignored the signs from my body, my body spoke to me in really loud ways. Like the time I broke out into shingles. Full body shingles.
YES! My entire body. Navigating stillness for me has been shaped by pain.
How do you get stillness from pain? What is this journey from pain to stillness? If you embrace the stillness, what will happen? What have you defined stillness to be?
Pain is what causes me to stop. I often have not done a great job of listening to the subtle discomforts my body presents. I push past the discomforts and become logical and action-oriented to complete things. My mind and the action of “doing” takes over. It has taken a few extremely painful moments in my life for my body to get my attention. Here are the three kinds of pain I’ve identified that have shaped my journey with stillness:
#1: If I’m still, I’ll die.
In moments like these, I’m always in motion. I only stop when it’s time to eat or sleep. The doing is constant. Not present to what my body, mind, and heart need. And, painful things happen, like I throw my back out and I can’t move the next day.
In that stillness, you find you.
#2: Pain caused by stagnation.
This is when I’m not moving enough, escaping myself by getting lost in reading a book, over indulging in binge watching, etc. The perceived resting. My body is sore from just sitting around. I’m sleep deprived, with bags under my eyes.
In that stillness, you recognize you can’t lose yourself.
#3: Forced movement.
Obligations — everything and everyone else is important — keeping myself so busy because so much is expected. No time for me. I don’t notice I’m not eating or sleeping well. My shoulders and jaw may be hurting. I just go, go, go.
In that stillness, you learn you are a part of your life’s equation.
I’m going to focus on the last type of pain to illustrate being forced into stillness.
It was September 1, 2014, and I was ignoring the obvious pain of my 15 year marriage/17 year relationship. I had poured myself into my business to make sure I could handle my husband’s increased loss of eyesight at the time. He had an eye condition called Retinitis Pigmentosa, and I wound up carrying the financial load when he retired early from his job as a scientist. We had our younger daughters to finish putting through college. Neither my husband nor I really were addressing the obvious. We made forced motions to help the relationship. We did all kinds of counseling, and what I came to realize is unless we got really honest with ourselves or each other as partners, and addressed the underlying issues, nothing got resolved and there would be no healing movement forward.
I spent so much time trying to figure it out. I spent a lot of time in my head justifying being busy and doing it “for the family.” I ignored all my body’s signals — feeling tired, not sleeping, not eating, just doing the business. I didn’t want to entertain a divorce for a second time. Geez, let alone who divorces a blind man? So much anger, shame and guilt were building up in my head and in my body. The more I stayed in my head to figure things out and ignored the signs from my body, my body finally broke out into shingles. Full body shingles.
Yes, my entire body! Then, I was forced to take time off. I was forced to really look at what was hurting my heart. One night, I was so frustrated with the physical pain and the torment in my mind all I wanted to do was cry and I couldn’t. It took my youngest to step into my room and tell me gently, “Enough. It’s ok you know what to do. We know you’ve done everything to make it work.” She gave me a hug, and at that moment, I let myself cry. What a jolting moment! My daughters were watching me suffer. All that spinning in my head — guilt, shame, anger — kept me from seeing the next step. It was through this forced movement that I finally accepted the obvious: my marriage, as it was, no longer served either of us. We had grown apart and wanted different things.
Interestingly enough, as I took those next painful steps of communicating this realization, my symptoms began to resolve. What I learned so powerfully is when I go into my head and I disconnect from my body and heart, I create pain and suffering. My forced, go, go, go, movement in an effort to keep everyone else’s needs before my own was resisting the change that would allow more flow for me and really for my former husband. I ignored my values and my body when I was in “the doing” of my relationship. I needed to reconnect those parts of me, my whole being, to make the best decision.
What I learned in the pain…
When I take a moment to acknowledge to myself what I need, ask for what I need, and accept it by stepping into and allowing myself to embrace my desire and be embraced, I notice my breath catches, my heart quivers, my body pauses … then, my body quietly shakes, I surrender my thoughts, and my heart gently opens. My body, mind, heart can gently reset and tears begin to flow.
There have been many times I have ignored the obvious physical discomforts because something else is perceived as more important.
Stillness is a medicine that takes
a moment of you witnessing and accepting yourself, a prescription to pause in the middle of the motions of life or commotion of life and allow what’s occurring to move through us in that pause… the stillness. When we invite in the gentleness of the medicine that stillness offers, that quietness is all we need to heal the perceived broken part of ourselves.
Being still with your pain, what wisdom does it offer you?
What pain or discomfort are you avoiding being still with?
stillness is a prescription to… pause.
