Some persons are blessed by nature, upbringing, or simply good fortune to develop and experience personal authenticity. Most others of us however are called by the psychological and spiritual pain of inauthentic living.
When faced with such personal pain and suffering, how then shall we respond? Shall we flee pain’s sharp edge, or shall we embrace it thereby engaging ourselves in an unparalleled adventure of self-discovery?
Rumi, the Persian ecstatic, sang, ‘These pains that you feel are messengers. Listen to them.’ What?! Not numb or run from pain, but listen to it? Why?
A principle of holistic medicine perhaps can shed some light. Commonly we caricature allopathic medicine as treating the symptom rather than the cause of disease. In contrast, we value holistic medicine’s understanding of illness as the body’s signal that there is something wrong whose cause, not effect, needs curing.
So too psychological pain is the psyche’s signal that there is something wrong with the soul that needs remedying. To numb ourselves by losing ourselves in television or computer games, binge eating, boozing, manic busyness, etc. is similar to the allopathic strategy of dealing with the symptom not the cause of our pain. We may experience relief of symptoms, but not a cure. We may sleep better at night, but die impoverished of a life of personal meaning. Instead, a holistic approach to our pain would be to seek its cause by inquiring into our selves and our lives.
So psychological pain then is a messenger to whom we would hearken were we to heal the soul, rather than numb the symptoms of our suffering. And were we to listen as Rumi’s counsel, what might we find? We might find that the ultimate cause of our pain is the inhibition of our authentic nature – a life lived distantly from our deepest selves.
Each of us is endowed with a nature that expresses itself uniquely; each of us is born to unique life conditions; each of us experiences life with a style and perspective that is distinct; each of us stands in a place that cannot be occupied by another; and, each of us is called to manifest the magnificence of our distinct individuality.
Yet each of us also is socially conditioned to be like everyone else. Fit in. Listen to authority, not yourself. Yet, the road to personal authenticity is not to become like someone else, but to become more like your own unique self.
So rather than our psychological and spiritual pains being threats to our existence that we would numb and shun, perhaps these pains are the very calls of our souls to an authentic life. If heeded, perhaps they would liberate us from the thralldom of lives that have been hobbled by our efforts to live like everyone else, not our deepest natures.
Michael Nagel is author of this article on Portland counseling.
Find more information about Portland therapist here.
Article Source: Heeding the Call to Personal Authenticity.
