Here we are for the last week on the three most powerful questions to transform pain and fear. Since pain is an expression of fear — they are intimately related — apply these questions to either or both, however it best serves your lived experience.
To resist it? No. When we resist pain, it persists. Do you want more pain or less? If you want to transform fear, you must embrace it. Fighting it adds drama and makes the fear linger in you longer.
Love transmutes fear.
To "transmute" something means to change it completely, often into a different and better form. It implies a fundamental alteration, not just a slight change. Transmutation can refer to a physical transformation, like changing an element in chemistry, or a more metaphorical change in nature or appearance.
It’s alchemy. There's wonder here, what some call magic. It's an advanced way of seeing, and being, beyond what most humans are willing to embody yet. (See Exhibit A: Colossal fear surfaced on this planet, because we are not yet ready as a collective to greet it with the only thing that can heal it: Love.)
These three questions didn’t come from a college course in Awesome Life Studies. They surfaced through my own life experiences with chronic illness, food addiction and severe pain. On the other side of the pain, I am thriving — and I know you can too. Since pain is an expression of fear, they are intimately related, so please apply these questions to either or both, however it best serves your lived experience.
The first most powerful question to transform fear is, How is this perfect?
The second, What is this pain costing you?
Finally – How might I have created this?
What choices did you make that might have contributed to the painful experience you’re having?
What are you afraid of, deep down, that you might have brought this pain into your life to wake you up to?
What do you want to see, that this pain might be helping you see?
What kind of world do you wish for that might have led you to unconsciously invite pain’s pinch in, to impassion you to dream it into being?
Most of the time, humans unconsciously create pain. We don’t tend to say, “Yeah… I’d like to create some pain so I can learn something.” Through Love’s eyes, though, we can see the global surfacing of intense fear and pain as a gift in disguise — one whose message we can listen to, extending our “making Love to fear” embrace and, unlike a great lover who we want to keep around, we can let it move through our lives rather than sticking around.
Asking ourselves this question requires courage. These are powerful questions, not weak ones. Pull out your journal and pick up your truth telling pen.
When you wait to address your pain at its source, which is within YOU, you prolong your own suffering and you feed the degree of suffering on this planet.
Here's a piece I wrote after a multi-year slow dance in Yowwwwwwwwwza Ouch Land: Three Silver Linings of Severe Pain.
Making Love to fear can be so scary. But I can tell you that after embodying this way of being for years now, it's not only a lot less scary – it's actually enthralling. Day in and day out, I get to watch as I greet my own pain and fear with the full embrace of what we call “making” Love, and they dissipate within days, or sometimes even just moments. When you're ready, dive in. Until then and always, you are loved.
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