Journey from Head to Heart (eBook)

In the elegant office of the psychologist I had chosen from the Yellow Pages, I wrote my answers to the questions. When I read, “What is your goal for your counseling sessions?” my eyes filled with tears and pain pierced my heart. Without hesitation I wrote, “Relief from pain.” I had reached my limit, and I was exhausted from the effort. I was ready to leave the pain, ready to learn how to live my life differently. What I hoped was that the psychologist would give me a few affirmations that, like a magic wand, would make all my difficulties go away. I wanted an easy answer and quick fix.

Like me, most people prefer to live life painlessly. Something hurts us, and we bounce back quickly, like a four-year-old saying, “That didn't hurt.” Or we wail for a moment and then look for a Band-aid?, preferably one stamped with cartoon characters to help us cover a wound with make-believe fun. Like me, some people eventually feel a pain that no Band-aid? can cover. Then they decide to leave the pain. Unlike me, some people can keep up this denial for a lifetime, for the sake of appearance or personal expectation. In the great Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, the chorus ends the play with these words, “Therefore, while our eyes wait to see the destined final day, we must call no one happy who is of mortal race, until he hath crossed life's border, free from pain!” Thus, happiness and pain seem detached opposites, either/or extremes, as if one person cannot experience both.

We want to be happy. In fact, in the U.S. the pursuit of happiness is part of our DNA.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness“ (Declaration of Independence).

We go to great lengths to make ourselves and other people happy, including engaging in all manner of dysfunctional and addictive behaviors—flattery, deception, manipulation, abuse of alcohol or drugs, immersion in fantasy such as television, accumulation of material goods—anything that makes us look or feel good and thus numbs the pain we truly feel.

In Sophocles‘ words, “The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities,” so we blame other people for our misfortunes because it takes the burden off of us and makes us feel better. Some of us continue to do this for a lifetime and thus deceive ourselves into believing we are free from pain. However, it is this very pride that prolongs our suffering. Nothing else. Hubris, the Greek word for pride, was most often the tragic flaw that brought heroes down. And it is pride that continues to bring us down. Every time we tell the story of how someone wronged us, we experience the pain again, one more time. It is only our pride that binds us to the wound.

There is only one way to leave the pain. Face it. Look it in the eye. Walk through it. Feel it intensely. Acknowledge your own role in bringing it on. Love yourself anyway. Grieve it. Accept it. Learn from it. Then let it go. With love, we are able to leave pride and embrace humility as the pathway to happiness. Even Sophocles recognized the power of love to relieve pain. “One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love” (Oedipus at Colonus).

Leaving the Pain through Cataclysm

For many people, leaving the pain is cataclysmic. So it was for me. First, it meant leaving a familiar place. Then it meant divorce and my children‘s disapproval, which was the worst pain of all. Ultimately, it meant acknowledging my own shortcomings. It meant I had to stop running from that which made me unhappy and take a long, hard look at what I was running from. It meant years of a process that some refer to as “peeling the onion,” as I gradually became aware of the neuronal connections, memories, and patterns of behavior that were not serving me well. For the first time I fully understood what Socrates meant when he said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Yet still I was intent on restoring my image of perfection until finally I submitted to someone who could see the exact nature of my wrongs and lift the veil for me. Only then did I begin to experience healing and freedom from pain. In the eighth chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus explains that as long as people find their identity and meaning in life from worldly matters, they do not know God. But when they let go and open themselves to God, then as Peterson (1995) writes: “you will experience for yourselves the truth, and the truth will free you” (p. 208). The word “salvation“ derives from the Latin root salve which means “healing.” For my healing to occur, I had to let go of that which separated me from God, which was my own ego. On my own, I couldn't do it. I had a blind spot. I couldn't see what I couldn't see. That's how powerful my ego was. It had blinded me.

Leaving the Pain through Being Startled into Action

She had come to this place two weeks early, which meant she desperately needed treatment and a safe place to stay. Just days before the end of our 28-day program she stormed into our room, throwing things. I was sitting on the balcony watching the waters rush over the rocks in the nearby stream. I didn't know what to say, so I continued to do what I was doing, which was nothing. She came out to the balcony and said, “They say they might not let me leave.” She had just come from a session with the psychiatrist.

“Why not?” I asked.

“They say I haven't found a Higher Power and I can't leave until I do.”

I didn't know what to say, so I did not respond. Instead, I turned back to enjoy the serenity I had found on that balcony, feel the breeze, hear the birds, and be quiet.

There was a very, very long silence accompanied by the quiet swishing of the soft wind through the pines.

Then—quietly—with awe—she whispered, “That's it.”

“That's what?” I asked.

“The stillness.” Long, long pause. “Isn't there something in the Bible about being still?” she asked.

“Be still and know that I am God,” I answered.

“That's… it,” she said slowly, with real peace in her voice as she rose from her chair to go back to the psychiatrist's office. She had found a Higher Power. Ultimately, she was dismissed with the rest of us at the end of the 28 days.

Until that moment my roommate had been spinning through life like a top, never stopping until she dropped and then, after short rests, spinning again. For her, life was noisy and fast.

At that time I knew a little about the brain. I knew that our brains work best in a state of relaxed alertness. To my delight the curriculum in this place precisely fit what I knew about how the brain works, and I felt that if people could just get still, something inside their brains would tell them what to do next. This experience with my roommate taught me that, when we get still, we open to a voice we cannot hear in the normal din and clamor of modern life.

In that moment, my roommate left her pain, startled into the experience by the ultimatum she had received. Some of us need to be startled in order to be able to leave the pain.

Leaving the Pain through Steady, Sustained Personal Change

But what about those who experience neither cataclysm or surprise? How do they leave the pain? Or, after cataclysm or surprise, how does one sustain the change that has begun? After all, the neuronal patterns and cellular memories are still there. Whatever we learned, whether erroneously or not, in our early formative years stays with us as our “default” behavior. Can one cataclysmic event change that pattern for always?

Technically the answer is “Yes,” but realistically it is “Probably not for always.” Without reinforcement, learning fades. For example, can you write the Pythagorean theorem today even though you knew it perfectly in the tenth grade? Can you name all the prime numbers? Do you even remember what a prime number is? Can you diagram a sentence? Write a verb in the past perfect progressive tense? Recite Portia's “Mercy Speech” fromThe Merchant of Venice? Probably not. You learned all of these things in school after the age of 6.

Similarly, when as adults we make a decision to leave the pain, we must realize that our brains and bodily memory systems are holding patterns created when we were much younger and which will try to pull us back into old behaviors that we want to leave. This is why alcoholics are encouraged to make new friends to replace their drinking buddies. Simply being in the presence of people with whom they have drunk alcohol will likely trigger their own addictive patterns and pull them back into drinking. It's why members of Al-Anon are encouraged to form relationships with people who “have what they want.”

If I have decided to leave the pain of not having enough money because my credit card debt is so high, then in my free time a good choice would be to take the dog for a walk or take a picnic to the park instead of...