“We are all alchemists transmuting pain into aliveness, unwanted experiences into awakening.”
Rashani Rea
I was listening to Brene Brown on audiobooks the other day—Braving The Wilderness: The Quest For True Belonging And the Courage To Stand Alone when I heard this quote by James Baldwin: “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” If you have ever been the object of someone’s hate, as I have, you know the utter pain of it in your bones—the pain of the hater projected on to you. And yet you experience it as your own, and are likely to fling it back—-unless you have learned to have super-human healthy boundaries. Sometimes I think that is what enlightenment is about—having such healthy boundaries that you no longer need to hate or feel hated. You are able to witness it and let it go.
What is required to have such equanimity? The following is an excerpt from my book, Loveseed: The Template For Birthing A New World, that sheds light on this question:
When you choose to train unconscious habits and tendencies beforehand, you increase your capacity for free will. The ability to remain aware of yourself in the face of strong emotion is a skill that you develop over time. This is without a doubt a path of courage to step into unknown territory where you will become someone you don’t know yet. You just keep getting braver as you go, facing everything that arises along the way.
Think about it. You have all the ingredients right inside you to be a master of your emotions, if you can observe your emotions, without judgment. When I work with people, I break it down into five main emotions. I have them hold up their hands and count them off: sad, mad, glad, afraid, ashamed. I have heard of other categories, but in my experience, these five cover the range of emotion most people experience, and it has to do with degree beyond that. Sad can be melancholy or deeply grief-stricken, mad can be irritated or enraged, and so on. Note my hand-made illustration!
If you want to fine-tune your awareness, use Hawkins’s map of consciousness, and whenever you feel a certain emotion, go for the next feeling up on the ladder. I have a copy in my Day-Timer so that I can touch bases with my intention if I feel wobbly. I always know I am heading for love.
If you are feeling guilt, apathy or grief, see if you can move through fear and desire and reach for anger consciously—-where you feel the anger of even having to deal with the issue. I personally use anger to fuel my transformation, and if I get stuck, it is in pride, which comes right before having the courage to see in a new way. I may linger in my own inflated sense of pride if I feel especially hurt, but eventually, I feel the healthy pride of my own deservedness that says, “C’mon Kathleen, let it go. Just breathe and let it go. You know that’s what love would do. “
The breath carries the intention to surrender into existence. I breathe one breath after the other into the center of my chest as the space around me becomes filled with breath and the intention to surrender. Somehow, as all part of the Great Mystery, I get brave enough to let go. This is emotional alchemy.
This is the movement of letting go, is both the movement of a single moment and the movement of lifetime. It may be the path you take during an argument, when you drop your end of the rope and breathe into your heart, soften your belly, and begin to listen to the other person. It may be the path you take when you face the fact that you are no longer fulfilled in your job, or your marriage, or anything you had previously devised to keep you happy.
This path involves surrendering what you are experiencing and thus are identified with in order to open to something uncertain. It involves conscious suffering that you both experience and witness within the larger context of your life. It involves a kind of spiritual or mystic death, after which you are changed, and life is no longer a dedication to self, but a celebration of life. It involves showing up as who you really are.
Sometimes the very thing you have hidden, including your hatred, even from yourself, turns out to be the one precious thing about you that saves your soul! It is the place you refused to conform and go numb or be nice. When you face and surrender the hatred, so deeply connected to your pain, you begin to experience yourself as enough, and hope rises in the direction of your destiny.
I choose a world where we feel the pain and transform it, over hatred any day!
Thank you Kathleen. Thank you for sharing James Baldwin’s quote. Holding onto the hatred as a way to protect yourself from what you consciously or unconsciously believe to be a pain that will kill you!
And thank you for sharing David R Hawkins – Map of Consciousness. I too, find it to be a great tool to help me redirect from a place of activation.
I send you love and gratitude for being you and sharing your gifts of Love with us.