Pain to Power: Safe Spaces

In our last blog post we talked about the necessity of feeling our pain for it to be transmuted to power. Now, you might be thinking “Oh, I feel my pain just fine”, but do you really? When you experience discomfort of any kind is your initial response to examine it and ask why it is here? Maybe you react instead of respond and immediately attempt to sooth or push it away. Maybe it depends on the conditions of your environment. Is it safe to experience the fullness of your pain in the present moment? What does safety to experience pain look like?

For the purposes of this post I’ll focus on emotional and psychological pain. In my experience safety to feel and process pain includes a validating environment free of judgement or condemnation. Take a minute to feel into that statement. What does validation feel like? Can you think of a time you have experienced validation or an environment free of judgement? What does it feel like to let your defenses down and just be who you are? When was the last time you took the time to just accept yourself without the need to analyze, or pass some moral judgement on yourself? When was the last time you held space for someone else’s feelings or emotions with out the need to analyze or pass judgement?

Transmuting pain to power requires tuning into and sitting with the energy of pain without turning away from it. Determining who is willing and able to provide safe space and learning to hold space for yourself are both essential skills in learning to sit with pain. Your challenge until the next blog post is to work on finding safe space to start fully sitting with your pain. The amount of time is not important. At this point all that is important is the awareness of whether it’s safe to experience.

Next Post: Emotions and feelings are just energy. The ability to determine what emotions and feelings belong to you and which ones don’t empowers you to decide what to do with the energy of pain.