5 THE PURPOSE OF PAIN

Unless a person has tools to support healing in their lives, painful realities remain hidden in their minds and bodies. I wanted to explore with Richard how these stored realities express. I marveled that people who have no idea that there are tools with which they can unload their burdens survive as long as they do.

"I hear, loud and clear, that you would rather not deal with your pain, but allow me to add another piece to the puzzle," I offered. "What you hide from yourself is your dis-ease."

"How did you get from stored, painful realities to disease?!" Richard demanded.

"Physicists tell us everything is energy. Think of the body being an energy field instead of physical matter. There are two main categories of energy relative to that field. There is disintegrative energy, which tears the human energy system down and integrative energy which builds the system up."

"What does that have to do with disease?" Richard said.

"Pain is a signal of dis-ease. Not disease, but dis-ease. It tells the system that somewhere within there is something physically, mentally or emotionally out of place. It is not an enemy, but a friend in disguise. When we don't want to listen to the feedback the system gives us, it gets our attention by yelling— pain!

"The purpose of pain is to make our ears grow. If we refuse to listen by suppressing the warning, it will grow in intensity. Pain will not be ignored! Sooner or later, it gets our full attention and we follow its guidance to correction, or we die. This applies to physical, mental, emotional and relationship pain.

"Getting rid of pain without dealing with its message is like cutting the wires to the bell on a fire alarm. The fire alarm screams out to get your attention, to tell you there is a problem. It demands, 'LISTEN TO ME.' If you refuse to listen by shutting down the feedback, things do quiet down, but the fire still rages somewhere. Sooner or later, the fire will break through and make you aware that it is burning. The longer it takes to recognize where the fire is, the more difficult it will probably be to extinguish. Killing the bell certainly has nothing to do with putting the fire out."

"Pain is just a bell, warning us that we need to look at something?" Richard asked in amazement. "I always thought you were just supposed to take a pill to make pain go away and that was how you got well. That's what I was taught!"

"That thinking will sure sell a lot of pills, but shutting down the alarm without dealing with the fire that's burning will lead to total destruction. Obviously, pain held anywhere in tissue does not contribute to the health of that tissue or any part of the system. The only reason for pain, 100% of the time, is the disintegrative energy that invites us to look deeper into ourselves and deal with whatever we have hidden there.

"Medical research is proving that every cell in the body stores information. Our dis-ease and our pain come from the energy introduced into tissue by the negative realities we store there and the drugs we use to keep those realities suppressed. The secondary cause of pain is the lifestyle we choose to keep ourselves in a weakened condition."

"What?" Richard blared. "You've got to be kidding. Who would purposely weaken themselves?"

"Think about it, Richard. You can't suppress anything in an energy system that is at full vitality. In order to suppress, something has to shut down the flow of energy in the system so that whatever is hidden remains that way.

"Show me someone who takes a drug for, let's say, depression. If you remove their drug, what happens? They begin to remember what has been suppressed by the drug and go back into that depression, right?"

"Well, that means the drug worked, doesn't it? Without it, they feel depressed. With it, they feel better." Richard rubbed his chin and appeared to be struggling to understand.

"Depends on what you mean by worked, Richard. If sweeping something under the rug is your definition of 'worked,' drugs are doing their job. The action of most drugs, legal or illegal, including caffeine, nicotine, sugar, alcohol or junk food, is to lower the vitality of the system sufficiently so that the pain we desire to suppress remains out of conscious awareness.

"Notice, I said 'out of conscious awareness,' not gone or cured. It only means we are no longer aware of it. If we use drugs to suppress pain and the cause of the pain is still intact; sooner or later it will surface somewhere in the system, often under the guise of a 'side effect.' What you can't see or feel, you cannot heal. However, pain is not required, it is only a motivator. If we consciously choose to motivate ourselves, then instead of 'no pain, no gain,' our lives will be 'no pain, no pain.'"

KEY THOUGHT—Life is designed to give us as many opportunities as we need to heal. If we don't take the initiative and do our inner work, life often motivates us through pain

"Does that mean I should never take drugs?" Richard asked.

"There are benefits to the use of drugs in that you have better short-term function when you keep pain suppressed, but true healing is impossible in that state. Drugs in the hands of a true healer can be used to temporarily control threatening symptoms and they can save a life. However, they don't heal, though they can buy time to do the necessary inner work of healing."

I went on to reinforce that healing does not come from a drug any more than a fire is put out by cutting the wires on the bell. He seemed to relate to the idea that drugs shut down the highly tuned mechanism of feelings and rob us of our feedback. "The mind cannot show us what we are unwilling to see and therefore distorts every situation where there is denial . Drugs simply reinforce the blockages denial creates, they are like a physical form of denial. If one does not have and use tools with which to heal, drugs tend to become a way of life, a one-way ticket to degeneration!"

I shared with Richard a poem that sums up perfectly for me the whole topic of dis-ease and our part in it:

EACH MOMENT

Each moment of Love,
Each moment of anger,
Each moment of giving,
Each moment of lying,
Each moment of joy,
Each moment of fear,
Is a moment of living.
Is a moment of dying.
All our moments add together,
Like the digits in a sum,
And the answer tells us plainly,
Whether life or death will come.

Anonymous