A painful but necessary one.
Magic books exist.
Books that, wherever you open them, blow your mind.
And no matter how many times you read them, they tell you something different every new read.
One of those books is The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer.
The other day, I went to pick it up from the shelf and opened it to chapter 11.
This chapter starts with a cannibalistic sentence that bites into your conscience and doesn’t let go all day.
The cannibal sentence.
“One of the essential requirements for entering into spiritual growth and deep personal transformation is to make peace with pain.” — Michael Singer.
It is not easy. We all live in a culture of hedonism. Everything is set up to avoid pain. We don’t want to feel it. And we do everything we can to anesthetize it.
Everyone has their favorite anti-pain pill: sex, drugs, alcohol, video games, social networks, reality shows, chocolate, [Insert your unconfessable vice here].
But pain has an essential function: to get our attention.
It warns us that something is wrong.
We live in the attention economy, and everyone takes advantage of the pain points to sell you their magic happiness pill.
And I’m not saying it’s a bad thing per se.
But, pain is innovation, pain is progress.
Pain is the future
Whenever I think of pain, I visualize the video game Sonic.
If you haven’t had a childhood, I’ll explain what it’s all about.
Sonic is a blue hedgehog who tries to collect rings and pass the screen before time runs out. The fun of the game is that the 2D screen moves forward as if it were the past, and if the hedgehog stands still, the screen continues to advance, eventually killing the hedgehog.
We are all Sonic.
We all try to escape forward in a race against the clock, trying not to let the past catch up with us so we don’t have to analyze it or suffer.
And it sucks because we can’t escape forever from what torments us.
In the words of Michael Singer, “When you can face your disturbances, you will realize that there is a level of pain deeply implanted in the center of your heart. This pain is so uncomfortable, annoying, and destructive to the individual self that you spend your whole life avoiding it.”
You are what you do.
And if what you do is run away, that’s what you are: someone who runs away.
Your whole personality revolves around avoiding pain. That conditions the way you live, act, and think.
But that personality is superficial, as you spend your life looking for cosmetic solutions to deep hurts: more money, more contacts, more social acceptance, more pleasure.
If life were about not feeling, why live it?
You have to dare to experience pain, little Sonic.
Sometimes, you must stand still and let the video game screen catch up.
Only then will you grow spiritually.
As Michael Singer says, “Pain is at the very core of your heart, and it radiates outward and affects everything you do. It is an inner pain that always acts in the background, hidden under layers of thoughts and emotions.”
Takeaway
“The psyche is constituted around the avoidance of internal pain, and consequently its raison d’être is underpinned by the fear of pain.” — Michael Singer.
And this is not a minor problem.
Your mindset is built and conditioned by fear and shapes your life.
For example,
Shame is the fear of feeling rejected, leading to fear of failure. And just that eventually makes you obsolete because you don’t dare to fail enough, and consequently, you don’t learn new things or innovate.
Shame paralyzes you and kills any potentially bright future you might have.
That’s why the opposite of fear is courage. The brave one faces pain. It is the one who dares to feel—the one who dares to love.
And so you cannot vibrate in abundance because fear is scarcity.
If you want abundance (that life improves), you need to vibrate in the opposite of fear: love.
To vibrate in love, you have to untie your inner knots; for that, you must be brave.
You have to release that pain that is acting subtly and constantly in all areas of your life on a subconscious level.
If you do, if you dare to look your deepest demons in the eye, invite them for a coffee, and listen to them, they will leave you alone. And your life will shine again.
A virtual hug
AG
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