Freedom by Understanding

THANK you pain

“Man, sometimes it takes a long time to sound like yourself.”

Miles Davis

I heard that Miles Davis quote for the first time last week and I love it.

In our culture today it feels like it can take us even longer to look like ourselves.

To accept ourselves as we are.

The “Golden Girls” as I affectionately call them in our knitting group like to joke that it takes until we have trouble SEEING ourselves in the mirror! I laugh, but I’ve noticed how hard they are on themselves and their beautiful aging bodies so body image does not necessarily improve with age. But isn’t this a comforting thing we all do? It never dawned on my that my Grandma didn’t love herself unconditionally like I did. They make each other feel better about being human.

There are so many podcasts that do this for me. Like Kate Bowler’s “Everything Happens” or Glennon, Abby and Amanda’s “We Can Do Hard Things” and the funny and wise Nadia Boltz-Weber . They love to slam self help and call things out in such a way that can have us feeling like we can be our scary tornado selves. They have this charming way of disarming our egos and calling out our toxic positivity that creates a powerful healing zone of non judgement.

Last week I wrote about the opportunity to make our perceived unwanted behaviours or “beasts” beautiful to help create this gentler place in ourselves when we are not always “living our best life”.

Today is about finding our way home, back to ourselves not by barging ahead guns ablaze, just the opposite. Let’s keep our snails pace consistend so that we can learn how to “listen” to our beasts and live the questions a bit longer than is comfortable to allow them to guide us to THE RIGHT solutions for US.

As I’ve touched on before, the something we continue to do in the short term to feel better that is having a negative consequence on our lives in the long term is not the enemy.

It’s the solution to a bigger problem.

The squirmy uncomfortable parts of us that keep scrolling on social media at midnight when we’re exhausted when what we really need is some deep restorative sleep or polishing off the bottle of wine ourselves while eating the leftover Hallowe’en chocolates when we know it’s not helping our overall health is not even the real problem. That is what you will be guided to see if you “call off the lads” and get still.

It’s gut wrenching for me to admit that even after a decade, I’m not totally free myself. I keep interrupting my own healing with feeble half-assed action and “shoulds”. I just want to say here out loud how hard it feels some days. A part of me wonders now if I made a big mistake two weeks ago stating publicly that I want to lose weight because while I DO still want to, I also want to be the kind of person that doesn’t want to.

In the same way I’ve heard Glennon Doyle Melton describe on a recent podcast how she’s still going to have poison injected into her face (her ref to botox) and keep dying her hair, but she aspires to be the kind of person that doesn’t want to do it.

Me too Glennon.

I am pretty grounded in my spirituality and I have no desire to serve two masters, but it feels sometimes like I am still in a kind of transitional or edge place where I have one foot firmly planted in the land of divine love and body positivity and total acceptance of all body types including my own “as is” and I don’t give this much thought or attention and just live my life. But the other foot moves back and forth often dipping into the valley of fear with a deep yearning to help my body back from years of neglect, binge eating but mostly from the realization that I love my life and really don’t want a preventable disease. It feels like a pretty rational form of fear but fear none the less.

This is what I’m sitting with now and today I’d like you to see me squirm out loud. To tell you more truth because I know that is how we heal.

It’s hard to change when we’ve been doing something and handling life a certain way but we can and we don’t need to do it by striving the way we often do. It can be aligned and we can tap into another more powerful divine alignment.

Sometimes it feels like I want more of my fear back because my ambition to change my body and get fired up to achieve any body goal appears to have left with my estrogen.

For me now it feels more about giving my body a chance and to find my power in a physical way to match how i feel on the inside. I’ve noticed my jackets getting tighter and in some ways I feel like a beautiful new top of the line Tesla in my mind and soul fully in the present moment driving down a gorgeous California costal highway and I just want to pull over to watch the sunset.

Wow it’s incredible - powerful and light, it’s like a panther. The engine is quiet. The sky is orange, the surf is strong, the birds high in the sky are calling to me and everything feels like it’s going my way.

Except one thing. I’m coupled to a giant rusted out trailer filled to the rafters with old junk. I’ve been lugging all of this old stuff for years and together we’ve travelled thousands of miles. Sometimes I even pull over and go through it all over and over. I’ve even invited others in to my rusty trailer to show them my stuff but now that I think about it, they don’t seem very interested in it. They are more interested in their own stuff.

But I’m done. My old beliefs and stories are now spilling out all over the road and the cars behind me are swerving to avoid a collision. The linchpin connecting my present beautiful Tesla self to the rusty heavy past that is no longer serving me feels like guilt and shame. It’s time to forgive and let it all go and set my self free.

I’m ready.

Oh good look…. I already found a nice buyer. One man’s junk is another man’s…well, new junk.

I’m free! Let the FUN begin.

So please before we get back on the road with my Tesla together , can I you please witness my edited OG aspirational statement…

To make peace with my ageing body, move it in new ways that strengthen and empower me and release the excess weight in all areas of my life. I love and appreciate my body more than I ever have and I deeply respect it like the divine miracle it is.

Last month I practiced what this could feel like by travelling lighter...

Baby steps:)

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After so many questions and messages after last week’s post, I’d like to spend a bit more time on how making our pain or “beast” beautiful (as something surprising or even divinely inspired) can be a game changer for us.

I confess I was a bit surprised to be messaged by so many of you last week about your mystery ailments, rashes, aging and body issues, back pain, covid, migraines and emotional dealings last week that you’d like to transform that I didn’t want to rush the transformative power of this step and move onto the next until next week because it has so much to teach us and can be easily glossed over or missed in search of solutions to quickly mask or eliminate the symptoms of any or all of the above.

Our time watching type A egos that wants this Substack to be shorter so it can get back to scrolling can start tapping its toe all it wants.

We are staying here a bit longer.

To be clear YES we should definitely deal with things. Of course and we will but in a different way.

Here’s what I know from my understanding and experience with lasting change…

Our bodies cannot lie and they will always tell us when we are out of alignment better than ANYTHING.

Fixing what appears to be wrong is not really fixing anything. It only temporarily changes the effects we see or feel on the surface like we heal a rash, lose or gain weight or get rid of our headache. We can analyze, diagnose and create winning protocols with an army of our favourite practitioners to facilitate our healing, and we will do it, but we’ll also miss the miracle and gift being offered.

I’m not messing around here.

We can get stuck in these learned and inherited patterns for A LIFETIME.

This step is more about being curious and open and asking better questions to really get to the bottom of what our particular persistent pain-in-the-ass beast is trying so hard to show or tell us.

This stage feels less of a defensive attack or a knife fight and more like a big long warm understanding hug.

Compassion and forgiveness, not judgement or shame.

For instance, if we take a sleeping pill because we can’t sleep and we’re exhausted that can seem pretty harmless. But what if we need to do it again the next night? And the one after that? Is that harmful? Having just spent 2 minutes researching I found a study from June 2023 that listed the long-term effects of using of sleeping pills and none of them are ideal. Would it make intuitive sense to find out more about why you can’t sleep and solve that issue instead?

That’s all this is. Getting to the deeper cause and the best solution FOR us at this time in our lives.

If you think this is woo woo nonsense you get to believe that too.

Gosh I love Thomas Merton because he really gets it. When we mask or fix things on the surface we are the ones keeping OURSELVES from living fully…

“If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.”
― Thomas Merton

WHAT IS KEEPING YOU FROM LIVING FULLY FOR THE THING YOU WANT TO LIVE FOR?

Here’s what I’ve found that is so juicy about this…

When we find ourselves challenged in some way if we decide to slow down and simply listen to our “perceived beasts” we can set ourselves up for the greatest perceptual shifts or what I like to call “see changes” of our lives.

Like the GIANT GAME CHANGING paradigm or “inner” shifts we’ve been longing for all along.

THAT is the miracle. Not the healing itself - it’s the effect of our shift in perception.

When change our minds, forgive and free ourselves from guilt and shame and THAT is the rusty linchpin tying us to our undesirable past behaviour. It is the key to help us have a realization of who we really are and close the void we keep trying so hard to fill.

So let’s get to it. Pain. Last week we saw how the Octopus was Craig’s teacher and this week I’d like to show you how pain was my mine so you can see this beauty in action. What has it taught me so far? I’ve narrowed it down to 15 :)

1. It deconstructed me. My own moral superiority and “Healthism” or attempts at teaching others about wellness or how to “thrive” and “raise their vibration to manifest their best life” came to a screeching halt when I suffered the way I did. Looking back, it was all perfect and exactly what I needed to learn to free myself from this prison of self-doubt and do the work.
   It was a reluctant way inside myself. It felt more like a radical UNDOING than anything helpful or inspiring at first. It quite literally led me to a God of my understanding. THANK you pain.

2. It’s humbling. Humility on the consciousness scale is around where the level of courage is and calibrates near 200 which is the gateway to higher levels of consciousness and marks the first position of true power (below courage is ego driven force) - here is the diagram again if you missed that Substack… it’s amazing how having the courage to claim something beyond our pride can open the floodgates to free ourselves. THANK YOU pain.

   

   Our egos get called out and ground down to a pulp in this process.

3. Accepting what is. Body Grief is a new word I recently came across that describes my experience perfectly. Most of us will feel some degree of distress caused by perceived loss accompanied with body changes, most of which are out of our control. Our shared human experiences like puberty, chronic or acute illness, ageing, menopause, trauma, surgery, loss of mobility, weight loss and gain or even the simple natural fact of turning grey and the array of mysterious symptoms we seem to feel as we age. THANK you pain (ok I’ll stop with the annoying “thank you pains” I think you get my drift:)

4. It forced me to stop my forward movement.

5. It taught me how to relax and breathe.

6. I learned to listen and be present.

7. It gave me choices and does every moment of the day (listen or numb out).

8. It introduced me to my higher self (My true self. A.k.a…. the voice of wisdom, the higher mind, the Holy Spirit in Christianity, the Shekhinah in Judaism, the Tao in Buddhism) One time, I can remember having the clear and patient thought or voice imprinted in me after ANOTHER failed diet… “Nona…are you done yet?”. Like I was two very separate people and my higher self was talking or putting up with my personality self or ego which I remember thinking was so odd and I wonder if I just had never heard or really noticed that part of me before now.

   For me the voice is wise and free. Can I tell you more about “her”?

She listens and speaks to me through my body. She’s unafraid and unaffected by culture or the good or bad opinions of others. She’s a truth teller but will never force me to change anything, she honours and respects my free will.

She rocks. I like to imagine her like this…

We all have a version of this primordial self inside of us and this is who is going to take the lead us out on the dance floor because she (or he or they:) always knows best and will never let us down. Before pain I would have made fun of this “irrational” idea.

9. I would never have guessed that my struggles with chronic pain and fighting my body shape or size could have taken me on such a transformative spiritual journey because my suffering felt so physical. When I had trouble walking and I only had the energy and mobility hobbling around with a cane or a walker for what was most essential in my daily routine and I stuck to my closest circle of friends and family like glue. It forced me to stay still against my will.

10. Compassion for all: Pain taught me to simplify and calculate and budget my movements (how many steps to the door of that store?) and it was my very first deep understanding. By stilling my body I very quickly found my inner world begin to shift. I moved towards compassion for ALL of those who struggle with their existence in any way.

11. Pain also taught me that knowledge is NOT understanding and as helpful as meds and experts can be, never underestimate how helpful it can be to have an experience that can’t be described or taught in any medical school. When can be told to take a deep breath and stop DOING anything but PAIN forces us to do it like when we are in labour, we can’t DO anything else but be present with what is.

12. Just to be. Be less worried about striving and doing.

13. I learned to check my pride and ego at the door. The grief can feel icky too. I loved to run and my new hips were implanted devices that would wear down quickly if I ran. So running was something I had to shelve. I remember a very fit friend teasing me when I didn’t bounce back that “this other person” was back on their bike competing in two weeks with his staples still intact as though that was something admirable to aspire to and I immediately realized or became aware that I used to think that distorted way too not realizing how insane it really was.

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Before I go any further, if you find the topic of aging bodies, beauty culture, body weight or food triggering for you, you may want to skip the rest of this one and come back next week.

***Please take care of you!!***

14. Sitting in what was (pain and shame), this thought dawned on me…

    WHAT a colossal fuc*ing waste of life, of time, intelligence and resources it was for me to fight something as natural as aging and my body weight. I mean, there are literal wars being fought in the world and I am feeling sorry for myself caught up in my own war with my body. It just came to me all at once and I cried. It was an ugly shoulder shaking kind of cry because I finally understood what had been motivating me to constantly diet and primp or not want to leave home without my mascara or my hair messy my whole life..

    FEAR.

    I wanted to be admired, loved, accepted and i NEVER imagined I was going about it so poorly because it was so close to me and I’m intelligent and politically free, HOW did i miss this?

15. It led me to more complex braver questions about why I really wanted to lose weight. The answers made me feel physically unwell. (note: Please don’t worry, no one is threatening to take your hair color or lip gloss from you here, this post is not to judge any of this I’m just sharing my personal experience and epiphanies from my pain.) I had a moment or “selah” when I read that we collectively spend about ONE TRILLION dollars a year on fixing our natural bodies with fillers, covering our grey, the makeup, dieting, the heels, the whitener, the spanx, the push up bras, plastic surgery and sexy outfits makes me feel unwell. OMG how could this be? Imagine all of the injustice we could bring to light, the people we could help, the wars we could stop and the world issues like world hunger we could stop with this money???

    Is this really what I want for me or for us? For our daughters and theirs? Asking these questions can lead us to confusion at first. I felt (and still do feel) torn about how key our global understanding of the impact of this issue of self esteem.

    My new question that I toggled back and forth for years on and still do is what is the TRUE impact on our mental heath and our planetary health?

    What is at the soul of it?

The questions keep coming, but so far those are just 15 of maybe 1000 compelling reasons to sit with our pain.

It seems that this beastly life challenge or thing I want to change about myself has led me on a long journey back “home” to myself.

THANK YOU PAIN. YOU ARE DIVINE.

If you like to journal or contemplate on a walk… what is your pain showing you?

CAN YOU COME UP WITH 10 OF YOUR OWN?

“Pain’s beautiful humiliations make us naturally humble

and force us to put aside the guise of pretence.”

David Whyte

On some level it feels to me now from above the tree line a lot like we separate our fear and pain but they are more like the birth pangs of a brand new era of human consciousness.

I say this because it felt like I was lifted by my whole experience of living the questions when I couldn’t find any lasting, satisfying or helpful answers by focusing my attention on trying to control or force my body to do what I wanted it to.

In Matthew 6:25-26 we’re given these instructions. I guess this is the gourmet & fashion advice column in the Bible: 

Don’t fuss about what’s on the table at mealtimes or whether the clothes in your closet are in fashion. There is far more to your life than the food you put in your stomach, more to your outer appearance than the clothes you hang on your body. Look at the birds, free and unfettered, not tied down to a job description, careless in the care of God. And you count far more to him than birds.

I want to feel more free like a bird does. Be cared for by a power greater than myself that made life possible.

As I began to have my own personal epiphanies with pain, I mostly kept them to myself. Going to church, studying scripture and doing the daily workbook in A Course In Miracles feels like the last place I’d find freedom from physical suffering but that is the only place I ever have.

I still free torn even writing about this today or showing up in the world as I am because I can clearly see that so many of us aren’t ready to do the work or ask these deeper questions yet but we will get there together. We may be living in the lower levels of consciousness in a negative or “service to self polarity” and so we only know know to use force to solve our issues which is representative of the fear we’ve all felt since the beginning of time in response to our deep desire to belong.

I can see now so clearly that being in a positive polarity or service to others mindset only becomes available to us above the level of courage which is sponsored usually by pain or something poking us in the side that we can no longer ignore.

Wow.

Yes ALL this from splitting my pants 24 years ago.

I was thinking on my walk yesterday that I can see and feel deeply how much I love my boys exactly as they are. My husband. Our golden retriever. My aging parents as they are. My in-laws, siblings, nephews, neighbours, on you.

Can I turn my unconditionally loving eyes on myself?

YES.

I realize now that our souls may be on a different path or journey and there is no way anyone else can know what is best for us, but we can all get to where we’re going faster by asking better questions.

We get to choose the questions we ask.

The Poet Rainer Maria Rilke in his “Letters To A Young Poet” offered some great insight and timeless advice in 1903 to a young soldier that seem to speak to where we’re going today:

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books penned in a language most foreign to you. Don’t search for answers now that cannot be given because you could not live them. And it is about living it all. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, at some distant point, without realizing it, you will gradually come to live yourself into the answer. Perhaps you have the power to educate and create, within a particularly pure and blessed way of life; train yourself to do so – but accept with true confidence whatever comes, and as long as it comes of your own freewill, from some labour within yourself, take it upon yourself, and hate nothing.

This is the best advice for all of us today.

We can LIVE ourselves into the answers and when we relax and allow the answers ALWAYS come once asked with our free will when it’s time for us to see the next layer of learning and this process continues until our last exhale and possibly beyond but that is a mystery for another day for all of us.

We’re here now.

The beauty of becoming is that once we soften, forgive ourselves, accept and allow ourselves to see the truth at the root of our fearful behaviours causing the effects we can finally see that we are best poised to take inspired actions and make changes from this more loving, soulful, accepting place when the time is right.

It can’t be rushed.

Before I go, I feel like I should warn you that this new “INSIDE out” way of change is that there are no prescribed linear steps to follow (which our egos adore) and this alone can be uncomfortable for us. If we can allow ourselves to see that barging ahead with other people’s “solutions” to our perceived problems works…. well, pretty much NEVER. We can take in advice and counsel on how they did something and then wait for guidance to find our bespoken path.

By not waiting I have come up with some pretty stupid solutions in my time.

The way life seems to work is that we plan and then things go wrong. Nothing ever goes as planned or expected, but often when things DO break or change the unexpected happens. We learn something we didn’t even realize we needed to know or pursue.

Being whole is not about being perfect, or reaching some ideal, but it’s orienting ourselves towards REALITY. The reality where nothing is EVER really under our control.

We can let go, feel peace and create a life filled with inner abundance no matter what the conditions are.

And I guess one more valuable lesson I’ve learned through my weight fluctuations I’ve also (mostly) made peace with the fact that people will always comment on other people’s bodies. Although in retrospect I see and understand that it has more to do with their own complex relationships with their own bodies than the person they’ve projected their own fears onto.

The irony is that while my body is larger now and to many others too fat or unhealthy, to recover from chronic dieting and bingeing it was a decade long process of learning how to stop dieting and to eat and exercise intuitively. I’m much happier, I have peace of mind more than I was when I was thin.

I don’t take any meds.

I rarely get sick.

I feel sensual with my full size. I don’t hate my belly or my stretchmarks and wrinkles the way I used to and I no longer go to great lengths to cover up.

Although if I’m being honest I don’t love my picture taken or focus on my body. I just want to neutralize my looks and all of our looks now. To see the essence behind the surface. The person inside the Hallowe’en costume.

To Embody unconditional love.

Being here, as is, in this life in this incredible body that moves me and allows me to experience it all is beautiful to me has led me to an unexpected place.

It sadly seems like it has never been harder to feel at home in our own body. It’s compassion and love that will do the deeper healing.

I hope this has helped you in some small way today, it has definitely helped me to wrestle with these words.

I still may have more questions than answers, but my prayer today is to surrender this whole “fight” to a higher power to be guided to what is true and right for me to find my power. To move my body in ways that strengthen me to commit myself in service.

To keep finding and feeling that more peaceful place inside myself beyond fear.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s okay if we’re not beautiful or if we admit we don’t feel like we’re enough, because I finally understand that even if we are famous super models we never will be enough from our ego’s perspective and it makes us unhappy to stay on that beauty train and “be your best self” carousel ride.

But we don’t need to leave the carnival!!

We can show up as we are and find what feels good. Increase our levels of physical activity and see what our bodies CAN do based more on our inner vitals and health markers NOT how we look.

We can REDEFINE beauty first if only for ourselves and forgive it all. Even those people that are profiting off of this growing Trillion dollar industry fuelled by our collective fear.

Our bodies are how we learn about our true nature. They are intelligent energetic temporary vessels. Instruments NOT ornaments.

My pain has mystically led to to a place in my mind where I’m actually starting to genuinely PREFER the real image on the right as much or more than the stunning glamour “look” on the left. It just dawned on me that the photo of the left is costing us a trillion dollars a year and the one on the right IS WORTH A TRILLION dollars.

Or because it’s one of a kind, maybe it’s priceless.

I'll be the first to admit that I’m not there yet with the body pictures, but now I know like Glennon I want to be… so I WILL.

My body may not LOOK good to others, but I can clearly see now that it IS GOOD.

On a whim after hearing that quote I googled Miles Davis this morning and looked at some of his old pictures and I noticed that he always looked so different, that it was hard to tell if it was even him and when I heard a sound bite of him in a movie trailer say…

“If anyone wants to be about creating, they have to be about change”.

It dawned on me how much I’ve been trying so hard NOT to age or change and to look like everyone else rather than find my own unique changing self expression and those life-long efforts to make my body conform didn’t help me love myself, they took me farther and farther away from me.

“Life is about adventure and challenge- it isn’t about standing still and becoming safe.”

Miles Davis

Our personal challenge is so valuable. Mine was worth a trillion dollars and it’s taking me on a brand new adventure with my body from a place of love, not fear.

I heard that it took Bruce Springsteen 6 months to make the iconic song “Born to Run” so let’s give this change we desire in our lives all the time it needs to tell us it’s secrets and in the meantime, let go of our expectations and let whatever comes surprise us. I may have been born to run but my pain has taught me that it’s okay to walk now too.

I’m ready to come forward gently with my scars uncovered and all the “proof of life” I’ve earned over the years in plain sight. My softening shape, smile and eye crinkles and rolls have been hard earned on my wild adventure but I look forward to whatever changes are coming for me tomorrow.

A new understanding seems to be what our pain and suffering is all about.

How about you? Are you done yet?

Nona

ps. THANK you pain. Oh and I think this is the theme song playing on my radio in my Tesla… by The Band. The song is about the burdens we all carry. The "weight" is the load that we shoulder when we take on responsibility or when we try to do good. It’s called THE WEIGHT. I love this group version featuring Ringo Starr and Robbie Robertson | Playing For Change | Song Around The World