From numbness to pain

I had someone come to see me a couple years ago with intense numbness in her left hip.  I don't know if it was from an accident or fall or if it just came on for an unknown reason.  So I start working on it and there was an interesting healing process that happened. Her hip went from numbness to an intense burning pain.  It lasted for a couple months and it was CONSTANT.  She was a little freaked out about it, but it was pretty clear that that was her healing process.  She kept coming in each week, and we kept working.  When I worked on her the burning sensation got more and more intense, but after a couple days it would get a little better.  And that was the process until finally the burning stopped and her hip returned to normal.

I brought her story up today with two different patients who came to see me for more energetic/spiritual work.  I told them both the story because even though she was healing from physical pain, their pattern was the same.  They were dealing with an emotional numbing, and their healing caused them to go through a painful process of actually connecting to their pain.  I decided to write a blog post about it because this same pattern is at work in most people that come in to see me. 

For most people dealing with trauma or "negative emotions" involves numbing out or checking out.  Sometimes people use drugs or alcohol for this, but most common is just disconnecting from their bodies.  Most people learn at an early age to dissociate, disconnect and shove uncomfortable and painful things down into some dark corner where they try to forget about them.  That dark corner is actually right in our belly.  Our culture reinforces this process.  Even our spirituality and psychology frequently involves "getting over things" and letting things go.  But I think that just encourages the process of disconnection and dissociation (in the spiritual community it's called spiritual bypass).  The more we disconnect, the more upsetting things get when we get triggered

This results in a cycle of numbness/pain cycle.  At the far end of this is almost total emotional numbness.  Sometimes when I ask people how or what they feel they are genuinely puzzled, as if its an unanswerable question.  What's happening is the question itself is bringing up an uncomfortable feeling, which causes the numbness mechanisms to kick in.  

But this numbness will eventually make us sick.  Numbing is only the illusion of disconnection, because we can never really disconnect from our pain.  It's a living part of us that over time will rot and decay and cause all manner of sickness.  We can't really get over it or let it go, we can only go through it and allow spirit to transform it.  But going through it involves a real surrender, a real fear about what happens on the other side of letting go.  I used to push people more into that space, but I do that less.  I have a really deep respect for the darkness that lives inside of us and I don't want to push someone into that space if they're not really on board.  

So I called this blog post "from numbness to pain" but that's only part of the story.  When the pain and rot and decay begins transforming it actually becomes the earth from which something new and beautiful grows.  Each person has a unique growth, unique to their life circumstances and their purpose for life on this planet.  But its beautiful to watch that process happen.