I was talking to a friend of mine about this thing that always happens to me, everyone wants to confess their secrets. Maybe I have a face for it, maybe they can tell that I genuinely care, or that digging around in the things that are most neglected fascinates me. He commented that it must be a burden for everyone to want to tell me all their troubles, but I don’t see it like that at all. I’ve always thought of it as a gift and have welcomed it because I see the problem, issue, or disturbance as the thread that leads to the light. By grabbing hold of what’s perplexing us we are inexorably lead back to the original source of pain. All it wants is our attention. In fact that’s a secret to healing, directly facing what frightens us rather than ignoring it and hoping it will go away. It always comes back to the work, only our hard work will heal what hounding us. There is no such thing as a spontaneous fix, even though that’s what we all wish for. Having said that, once we put any kind of attention on the issues vexing us there seems to be no end to the magic that happens to facilitate its reconciliation and healing.
It’s an odd gift to be troubled, but once we see that discomfort is actually pointing us in the direction that will ultimately solve the problem we’re half way there. Our pain, anger, or frustration, shows us exactly where we need to be looking in order to resolve what wounds us the most. It acts as a kind of compass, and all our heartache and disappointment will always point us true north. This equation is also proportional, the larger the problem the greater revelation it holds. If we can be courageous enough to embrace what’s presented to us and see where it leads, we’ll be shown an answer. But prepare yourself, it may not be the answer you were expecting. And getting there is serious work that takes an incredible amount of emotional energy and buckets of patience and persistence.
The trick is beginning. We can always start where emotion is blindsiding us. All of a sudden we are overwhelmed with feeling and don’t know why or where it came from. We are enveloped in a high or low we can’t explain. This is where we pick up the thread because that intense emotion points to what really wants our undivided attention. It wants us to ask why and follow where the why leads. This same technique is used for the dream world, usually startling and unnerving dreams are screaming at us to look at them closer, it’s pointing to what we don’t see, to the thread that’s running underneath it all. We only run into trouble blaming others. The invitation is always to look more closely at ourselves. It’s more accurate to say outside issues and people are triggering something inside that wants our attention. The hints we get may be external hints but the dig is always within. The beauty of it is that we don’t have to wait for anything to come together, or for the timing to be right, we can always just begin where we are with what we have.
If we can look inside and pick up the thread of what calls to us, whether it is love, hate, sorrow, or joy, we will inevitably be lead to that which holds the key to our transformation and healing.
kb
