Month: September 2016

Is Pain Godly?

Photograph © 2016 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2016 Peggy Kornegger

What role does pain play in our lives, if any? Certainly it can be a reminder at the physical level that we may need to pay more attention to our own health or stress level. But beyond that, what function does it serve? If looked at from a spiritual perspective, pain is present for a greater reason, as is everything that appears in our lives. There are no accidents or coincidences. No alien beings possessing our bodies against our will. If everything is God, then how exactly is pain godly in our lives? Good question, especially for me, as I have spent most of my adult life living with recurring pain in the form of migraine headaches. For many years, I also carried a heavily weighted wish for them to disappear and leave me in peace.

It was an interesting thought: that I couldn’t be at peace if I was in pain. True? Not really. I can be at peace if I let go of suffering on all levels, including the physical. If I am in pain but not suffering, peace is present. Which comes first, peace or letting go of suffering? Actually, they are closely linked, like the loops in a Celtic infinity knot. The soul is always at peace; if the personality consciously aligns with the soul, it too is at peace and suffering fades. When I stop resisting the pain and just breathe into it, peace arises from my soul. Within peace, pain lessens and sometimes disappears entirely. So any way you want to approach it, peace and pain are not actually in opposition to each other. As my spiritual journey deepens, I continue to learn the truth of this.

I also learn about pain’s hidden gifts—how it can highlight the blessings in life, bringing into my conscious awareness how precious each moment is. After a two-day headache ends, I feel such immense appreciation for life’s small wonders. It also teaches me compassion and resilience: to have heartfelt empathy for others’ pain and to be able to spring back from adversity or trauma. Pain is the dancing spirit, like Kokopelli and his flute, that reminds me to embrace all of life’s experiences, even when they hurt. Life on Earth at this time is not easy. Every one of us has to face pain in some form, physical, emotional, psychological—even spiritual (the dark night of the soul).

There is a heightened energy now that is immersing us all in intense transformation within our day-to-day lives, and we are constantly adjusting to and integrating it, whether we are aware of it or not. Sometimes these adjustments, as we evolve and expand into light-filled human be-ings, can cause physical pain, emotional turmoil, or psychological distress. When we allow ourselves to fully feel whatever arises and let it pass through us without resistance, we move forward more freely with greater awareness, trust, and inner strength. We let go of the old and open to the new on the deepest possible level.

So, are my headaches related to planetary change? Perhaps my physical form is adjusting to embodying a higher vibration, an expansiveness that is continually creating new neural pathways. That may be pain’s ultimate hidden gift: an elevation of the human/divine experience. Still, on some level, it continues to be a mystery to me. But the mysterious, in all its wondrous manifestations, can be the gateway to spiritual insight. When I look through the eyes of my soul, I see with increasing clarity the oneness, the seamlessness, of all of life. Each experience I have is intricately interwoven with every other.

There is truly nothing in this universe that is not God, or godly. All of nature, all people, all events, all experiences, are interconnected. When we open to this truth, we learn to welcome everything as part of our growth and evolution. That is one of the blessings of the times we are living in. Gradually, we are beginning to recognize the presence of grace and perfection in every aspect of our lives, including what we can’t understand with the mind or have labeled “pain.”

 

A Lifetime Longing

Photograph © 2013 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2013 Peggy Kornegger
In a recent teaching, Panache Desai talked about how so many of us have unconsciously yearned to know God or the truth of existence all our lives. We didn’t always have words for it, but at our core was a deep-seated longing to understand the universe, to feel a connection to something beyond our own separate selves. In our individual aloneness, we reach out for contact, for meaning, even in our early years. I certainly did, although I did not recognize it as a desire to know God. My reaching or yearning took the form of fear. Fear of eternity, of an infinite universe. It scared me so much that I was unable to sleep at night, and my mother would sit at my bedside to comfort me.

I was not raised within any particular religion, so God was just an idea to me. A possibility, my parents said, a question that each person must answer for themselves. I suppose, in their own way, they were referring to what Native Americans have called the “Great Mystery.” Nothing I could relate to at 6 years old. What I was seeking was relief from the terror I felt whenever I thought about the universe going on and on forever. God’s existence had no relevance to that, at least in my own mind at the time. As I saw it, eternal life (heaven) and eternal death (the void) were both eternity and thus equally frightening. I lived for years and years with that fear embedded in my consciousness. Many times, I thought it would drive me crazy.

It wasn’t until I met Panache and began to work with him that the fears I had carried all my life began to gradually transform. Through him, and later on my own, I experienced infinity as divine presence, or God. It filled me with the most profound peace imaginable—absolutely no fear. I felt at one with everything everywhere, beyond time and space, and my consciousness shifted completely. It was then that I began to realize that this was what I had yearned for my entire life, this immersion in oneness and unconditional love that is God. I had always longed, as William Blake wrote, to “hold Infinity in the palm of [my] hand” and know it as pure love, not fear at all. And here it was at last—God’s loving gift of presence within my own heart and soul. In truth, that sacred connection had always been there. It is who I am, who we all are.

Sometimes you wait your whole life for a key experience that changes everything in all directions—past, present, future. Often you can only reach that experience after having lived your way to it. Ultimately, that is why we came to this Earth: to experience our separateness and find our way home again; to recognize that separation is only an illusion within that greater oneness which encompasses all of existence. That is the human journey, during which we can feel so lost and alone at times, but looking back, we see nothing but grace and love. In that moment of realization, of conscious awareness of our oneness with everything, we step into ananda, or bliss. We know in our deepest heart that all of life is a blessing and that we ourselves are a part of that blessing because we are part of the infinite presence of God.