Healing is not about getting rid of pain.

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It is not about learning to live with constant pain.

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And it is certainly not about avoiding pain.

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Healing is about something much more profound.

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True healing is about increasing our capacity to be okay with pain.

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We can never fully avoid pain in life.

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Whether it is physical pain or emotional pain, we are bound to experience it some time.

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We cannot avoid it.

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Life brings us pain in so many ways.

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Not to test us or to be cruel to us.

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Life brings us pain so we can learn from it.

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So we can grow from it.

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And so we can accept it and still move forward.

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When we experience true healing what happens is that we create more space for the pain.

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We increase our container for pain so the intensity lessens.

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And eventually, sometimes with outside help, we learn that we can feel the pain and still be okay.

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Still find a way to be happy.

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And still be able to enjoy life.

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Sometimes, resisting our pain causes us the greatest pain.

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Because we deny it is there and we ignore it.

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Yet we cannot ignore it forever.

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Eventually it will come back around and hit us over the head to strongly that we cannot ignore it any longer.

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Pain is a message.

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There is something to deal with here.

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And when we take the judgement out of pain, we begin to suffer less.

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We begin to be okay with what is.

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And we start to learn how to hold our pain in a larger context.

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We can be in pain and still smile.

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We can be in pain and still love.

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To the outside world it may not look like we are in pain.

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Yet whatever loss or trauma we have experienced is no less real.

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We just create a larger space to hold it in.

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Like water spreading out in a larger bottle, there is more air above.

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More breathing room.

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So as we breath through our pain and we see there are still good things in our lives, we relax.

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We shift our focus.

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The tension releases.

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And the results of hard work we have done to acknowledge and deal with our pain pays off.

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We have expanded ourselves.

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And in this expanded self is the expanded capacity to hold our pain without suffering.

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Is there some pain in your life where you can create just a little more room for it?

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~ Sam Liebowitz, The Conscious Consultant