Sunday 26 March 2017

The Pain Pantry

I have written before about the Mind Monster, that body of energy that is comprised of our most negative thoughts and that is all too often the nagging narrator of our lives. Something I’ve recently come to conceptualise is what I am calling the Pain Pantry. This is the place where we store the memory and energy of old pain or failure or of times we’ve been let down by others. When we feel low or upset or just for the hell of it, we go and pick a tasty morsel – marinated for years in anger or resentment - and bring it out to feed our Mind Monster. And boy does it love it!
   Certainly this can be a way of avoiding the pain of a current situation or of deflecting our pain onto others and is often the default setting of the hurt child. It is, however incredibly destructive. It helps underscore the ‘drama’ of the ego and reinforces our role as victims. It also generally results in us giving our power away; to the past, to the person who hurt us, or to the ‘out of control adult’ aspect of ourselves.
   Caroline Myss- medical intuitive and best-selling author puts it like this in her book Defy Gravity, Healing Beyond the Bounds of Reason. “Looking into your past to find information that gives you leverage to feel worse about your life or that allows you to feel entitled to make others suffer because you have suffered is a useless quest, much less a healing one. Wisdom is healing grace; not guilt, not fear, not the desire to go backward into agonizing over who hurt you so that you can tell them about it. Healing comes from gathering wisdom from past actions and letting go of the pain that education cost you.”
   So again it comes back to living consciously, being aware when we are heading off to that old Pain Pantry and seeing the futility and damage in that. And then we can pat ourselves on the back for just disappointing the Mind Monster which had been planning to make us miserable for days!!

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