Pain is here to serve

We change the world by loving it.

CARE check*: What is the relationship with the word shadow?

What is your relationship with the word pain?

What is your relationship with the word love?

What is your relationship with the word unconditional?

Words hold so much more that we give them credit for. The words we use, the words we hear are the words we feel.

In order to reclaim the narratives that serve, we first need to reclaim the meaning of the words that make our world.

I hope this week’s letter feel supportive and like a balm for your heart.

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Hi CARE friend,

How am I finding you today?

What’s present? What’s alive?

What’s tender? What’s sweet? What’s painful? What’s good?

Because Life is all of it always. We think admitting that is depressing, but I believe it is the foundation of hope.

Ironically, it seems to me that fighting this is the one thing we got wrong about the human experience that got us to live in a world that is so filled with unnecessary suffering.

And as many spiritual masters have taught us, suffering is optional… Pain is not.

If we tell ourselves that something has gone terribly wrong every time something goes slightly wrong, we feel incredibly disempowered. If we define a good life as a pain free experience, we’re LOSING THE PLOT. And we’re cursing ourselves into a Life that feels like an unfair story of failure instead of an awe-inspiring adventure.

Truth is Life is supposed to hurt. AND the truth is we’re also meant to feel joy on a daily basis. By putting all our focus and energy on denying the former, we lost track of the latter.

Life coach Brooke Castillo likes to say that Life is 50/50 always. And she won’t let you bargain for a balance that feels more appealing to the brain! She invites us to learn how to be with those uncomfortable emotions we have been trained to vilify, forgetting in the process that they are only and always here to serve.

I like to think of emotions as salt and balms. Some reveal our wounds, and others heal them. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that all that matters is the healing part, but you can’t heal what you won’t acknowledge.

Once you know the wound is there, you need a balm to tend to it, but if you don’t know that there is a wound (or where the root of the wound is), the easiest way for you to find it is salt.

This is something I’m working on with my coach right now. Finding the safety, love and strength—yes, in that order—to acknowledge all that I’ve lost, so that I can finally grieve… and move on. (Again, in that order).

Because we’ve convinced ourselves that there’s something bad with pain, we run away from it as if our Life depended on it. But pain is not the destroyer of Life! Pain is Life’s bodyguard.

Pain tells us what’s needed for us to survive and pain tells us what’s needed for us to thrive. Pain is our greatest ally on the way that Love has paved for us.

If you’ve ever run on a sprained ankle, you’ve learned that you should have listened and rested before your injury got ten times worse. On my own singing journey, pain has been my greatest teacher to uncover where trauma had been stored within me and how it had blocked my voice to keep me SAFE. Following pain’s guidance has allowed me to walk back my steps closer and closer to my center. Tending to my pain gave me back my INTEGRITY.

The further we run from our pain, the more out of alignment we get.

We need to feel our pain for our pain to be able to lead us to its origin. Pain is not the problem, pain is the messenger that there is a problem in need of care.

Modern Medicine teaches us to numb the pain and most medications are designed in that effect… and we’ve seen where that has gotten us.

So we have a choice: Learning how to be with our pain, how to feel it, how to understand it, move with it and tend to it until we can be guided to the root of it… or we can spend our entire lives trying to run away from messages that are stored in the very body we’re using to run away.

The latter is pointless and exhausting; it has no end and therefore no happy ending. The former takes just as much effort, but opens our heart, strengthens our spine and fosters healing and renewal.

As always, we get to choose our hard.

I believe this is the invitation of our times. The rainbow in the cloud that overcasts the world right now. The pain is on display… we cannot ignore it any longer. There’s no escaping communications in this day and age, we might get a filtered worldview but we get a wider one than EVER, still.

Shadow work is not for the faint of heart… but shadow work is the way of the heart.

That’s the other thing we tend to forget about Love: Love is unconditional. Love does not ask you to feel good to love you. Love doesn’t label anything as good or bad. Love is the essence of grief just as it is the essence of joy. And Love knows that pain is here to serve.

I know those feel like gut-wrenching, scary, heart-stopping and mind-bobbling times. That’s because they are.

But here’s another thing we’ve forgotten about Life that Nature is constantly trying to remind us of: Life is made of four-part cycles, with an expansion, a pause, a contraction and a new pause.

Our breath is a constant testament to that.

The expansion is meant to be a delicious exploration of the light! The contraction is when we come back to the darkness to review, reroute, refocus, reroot, renew and create what’s next. And just as there’s a pause at the top of the inbreath, there’s a pause at the end of the exhale.

One could say the contraction started with the pandemic… when we were all forced to witness that what we thought was mostly working for the human race was actually highly dysfunctional, leaky, and that many of our roots had got rotten.

Tending to our pain opens our heart, strengthens our spine

and fosters healing and renewal.

We’re still in this awakening phase and it’s sobering for sure. But not because it’s bad! Because it’s meant to…

Because we need to know what’s going on in our collective shadow, in order to be able to be the light that the darkness NEEDS to birth baby stars and to help them grow past the threshold of manifestation.

Now the question is how do we do collective shadow work? And the answer is by doing our own.

By understanding at the deepest level that the world is built from the inside out—which means that the outside can never be the place of transformation.

We each need to relearn how to tend to the pain that lives within each and everyone of us so that we don’t feel unconsciously compelled to project it outward.

Now, what do we need to do our own shadow work?

Boldness, bravery, military discipline and a sword?

No. Absolutely not. That’s how we’ve been trained to enter into the dark forest, but ghosts and other underworld creatures couldn’t care less about our attitude, bodies, weapons and mind… they only respond to the power of our hearts.

What we need to do our own shadow work is LOVE.

Love is how we make sure that the forces we use serve.

Indeed, we need the healing warmth of fire, not its destructive powers. We need the soft embrace of water, not a tidal wave. We need the caress of air, not a whirlwind. We need to ground our feet into the earth and to surrender our thoughts on the altar of our hearts.

We need a radical devotion to finding our way back to center and then a full-body commitment to staying anchored there forever more. We need to make our inner world a priority and to take full responsibility for the energy we bring into this world. We need to live our existence with intention and unfaltering trust in all that can be accomplished by open hearts, and to check our impacts with radical honesty.

We need to love our light into being and to love our darkness into healing.

We need to let ourselves reconnect with the spark that led us here and to remember that there is a dream within each and everyone of us that was always meant to be our most SACRED offering.

We need to reembody our voices, from our pelvic floor to our crown and through our gut, solar plexus, throat and third eye. We need to let that voice be free and heard—and to surrender each sound, each word, and each silence to LOVE.

We need to remember the sacredness of joy and harness any ounce of joy we can find on the daily. We need to ground in our power to appreciate the beauty, the kindness, the tenderness and excitement that surrounds us even on the darkest days… and we need to revere our anger and grief because, when alchemized through the heart, they are the most loving and potent agents of change.

We need to redefine for ourselves what feels like success and to reclaim the holiness of rest.

More than ever we need to study the stories of those that showed us not only that Love will prevail but HOW Love wins.

We need to promise to keep ourselves (and each other) informed, yes, but even more so we need to protect ourselves (and those we love) from overwhelm! We are not of no use to anyone if we’re burnt out by the news. We cannot stand up for what feels right when we’re drowning into what feels wrong. We are the light we’re looking for, so we can’t extinguish ourselves.

A frozen nervous system will not allow us to serve, and march, and show up, and LOVE each other. Only an enlivened and embodied heart can truly allow us to do that.

My dear CARE friend, we need joy, love and rest more than ever. And we need to erase the false notion that you can only be aware of what’s happening and in disarray OR at peace because you’re tuned out from the world. That is just not true.

The more we have, we can offer AND we cannot give what we do not have.

People don’t need to be shown that things have gone awry, they need to be reminded of how good it can get. We need a reason to get up in the morning and we need to build the inner safety that allows us to sleep at night.

We do not change the world by attacking it and we do not change the world by attacking those who we believe are destroying it. We change the world by loving it.

We change the world by being here.

We change the world by choosing to love UNCONDITIONALLY—which does not mean tolerating what cannot be accepted but does demand that we harness the tolerance and acceptance that lies at the center of our humanity.

I believe in us. I believe in our ability to evolve and to return to love, again and again and again and AGAIN.

I believe in our ability to figure things out and to bring love back into the most love-starved parts of our world.

I believe that things will get better and I believe that sometimes they need to get worse for the solution to be uncovered.

I believe in the power of hope and I believe in the power of our hearts.

I believe in the love that you are, in the love that I am, in the love that is the essence of all—and I believe that this contraction serves a purpose.

So let’s answer the call.

As I often write, we can only understand the redirection when we let it redirect us. The darkness is a nursery of stars and at the core of each darkened human psyche lies a radiant human heart.

Darkness cannot destroy darkness because it’s not meant to. However darkness and light have always been meant to coexist because without darkness, there is no light to be seen.

So here are the main takeaways I’m hoping that this letter delivered to you…

Life is all of it always.

Suffering is optional, pain is not.

Doing our collective shadow work begins and ends with each and everyone of us doing our own… and what we need to do our own shadow work is Love.

Love is UNCONDITIONAL. Love doesn’t label anything as good or bad. Love is the essence of grief just as it is the essence of joy. And Love knows that pain is here to serve.

And the very good news is that Love is who we are.

We need to love our light into being

and to love our darkness into healing.

WE CHANGE THE WORLD BY LOVING IT.

With kindness, love and light—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not need to fear anymore.

leo