I completely agree with the ancient teachings of Shamanism and Indigenous knowledge that pain is a portal.
Pain hurts, yes. But it also gives us an invitation. Yet our current society has completely lost touch with how to navigate pain and transition portals that bring us out the other side, renewed, born again. Colonial and patriarchal culture has no idea how to midwife the soul. So we patch up the pain. We ever-so-quickly put a sticky plaster over the gaping wounds that want nothing more than to bleed. The wound that bleeds is the wound that heals. But society is repulsed by the reality of healing. By the sight of blood. Of the messy, vulnerable reality of healing.
Plus to heal is to feel and sense into a reality outside of the dysfunctional one we are in now, which is a huge threat to the system. So systems of power will always (subtly) condition us to discourage true healing. They will always encourage us to keep going, patch things up, silence the messengers (symptoms), distort concepts like 'healing' and 'wellbeing', control and manipulate the body and self-pathologize. It's all just oppression and bypassing in disguise. To keep the status quo rolling. We dish out toxic positivity because we have no idea how to sit with someone's pain (without fixing). We have less and less skills in empathy and holding because we've never experienced it first-hand. We teach what we're taught. We keep grief and death (and vulvas) taboo because it helps us avoid existential growing pains. We avoid our emotions because we are completely emotionally illiterate. Emotions terrify us.
Falling apart, shedding our skin, deconstructing, breaking down (breaking through), entering the passage of initiation...is all implicitly frowned upon.
It's no wonder we are a society of closed hearts. The heart must remain closed to avoid all the hidden pain. It can be excruciating to have an open heart in this world today. It's no wonder we are a society of loneliness, of disconnection from one another. Of disconnection to ourselves (if we shut off the dark, we also have to shut off the light, the magic, the soul!)
It's no wonder we find other people's authenticity so threatening and uncomfortable. It tugs on our refusal of our own. Our bodies are filled with the physical manifestations of the grief of a soulless world. Of an un-communal and fragmented world. Of so much unlived life. So much anger, so much unresolved trauma. Of all the things we needed to feel, but couldn't feel...didn't know how to feel. And the complexity and rate of our illnesses are only going to get worse unless we begin to acknowledge these fractures and the culture we are expected to survive in.
We can try to skirt around the messiness of the human experience with happiness projects, enter the hamster wheel of endless personal development, raising our vibration to avoid the low. With endless distractions and lots and LOTS of doing and action (capitalism). Increase the external stimulation to numb out the internal noise. And yes it's normal and human to avoid the uncomfortable. But the truth is we aren't going to change or grow until we start to feel.
To slow down. To enter the body. To sink into liminal spaces. To experience what it really means to rest. To weep the tears that couldn't be wept when we were little. When we were hurt. To face what we are avoiding. To enter vulnerability. To travail passages of discomfort to unearth the buried. To stop the endless running from ourselves. To stop the denial. To soften all the hard places within us.
It is in fact these very messy, real, scary imperfections that are the sacred doorways to the heart.
Katy Kettner
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