A year ago, I was telling a dear friend about a situation that I had found myself in that had been so painful I could hardly talk about it with many people.

It was during that situation that I became a cocktail of feelings—as if I were a victim—angry at the world, and blaming everyone else at times for my dis-ease.

I blamed my parents, my husband, friends who I felt had wronged me, people who I felt had taught me things in my life that were not true—I blamed everyone else. To most people, it appeared as if I had it together, but on the inside I was in a perpetual state of negativity.

It was during that conversation with my beloved friend that all of it came to a screeching halt when she paused for a moment and looked at me with those dark wise-beyond-her-years eyes and said to me calmly, “Oh, the paths we choose, right? Oh, the paths we choose.”

Everything in that moment stopped.

Teachers have taught me that we are all responsible for our own energy, which was not a concept I was well acquainted with. I was so used to blaming everyone else—even the universe itself—for all of my “stuff.”

In that moment, the realization came pouring into my mind that all of it—every single fire that had blazed both within me and around me, and every one of the storms through which I had somehow put my head down and trudged, I had somehow chosen.

It was as if a switch had been flipped

I could see it all for what it really was, and what I see is that there is a wiser, timeless part of me that chose this exact route that I have been on all along as a means of figuring things out for myself.

I ask myself, why did I choose situations that were painful?

I do not have the answers to all of these questions, but the closest that I have come to understanding this lies in how I perceive both fire and pain.

Prior to giving birth to my two little girls, I remember coming across a concept that basically described pain as “information.” The pain that we typically perceive as being bad or negative in nature is nothing but an extremely intense sensation that stems from our brains, informing us that something is happening.

Something is needing our attention and pain is our messenger that speaks to us—sometimes rather subtly, but other times in a shrill, screaming voice, pleading, “Please stop what you are doing, listen, be present and take appropriate action if needed.”

Many fires in my life have caused me pain and have taken shape in different ways—relationships with my parents, romantic relationships, not rationing my energy appropriately enough to finish things that I started, my uncanny propensity to feel the need to breathe fire onto as many social justice causes as I can, and a myriad of other things that can only be described, in hindsight, as self-sabotage.

It was unbelievably exhausting.

I do realize that there were situations that were out of my control. Others in our lives have their own free will, right? While we can’t control what they do, we can choose our relationships, our own actions and our reactions.

If we are not choosing to respond, we default to a reaction and even that is a choice in and of itself.

Even though it is so eye-rollingly cliché to say that it taught me so much, it really did. All of those fires eventually did nothing but burn, and therefore transform, everything that I had believed about my world, myself and about life in general.

I somehow ended up in a place where there was nothing left but me, red and raw and scared and vulnerable, yet somehow having shed all of those layers that were no longer needed.

The irony in all of this is that while I have so much reverence for what all of those fires have taught me, the biggest truth that I now live by is that I do not need the fires to fuel me.

I have learned that we can see the paths that we have chosen simply as a story, and they are stories that we ourselves write going forward, and somehow perhaps have written all along—whether consciously having done so or not.

We can choose to not invite and attract the drama and trauma and we do not need to be guided by the lessons of pain or the light of a raging flame, but rather that of a gentler sort of light.

There is a healing light that can act as a better guide, and it associates itself with that of grace, joy, patience, love and even curiousity for all that is, and this light lends itself to a much gentler road.

 

Relephant: 

Dharma: Find Your Path & Purpose.

 

Author: Katie Vessel

Editor: Catherine Monkman

Photo: jeronimo sanz/Flickr