“We are not meant to stay wounded. We are supposed to move through our tragedies and challenges and to help each other move through the many painful episodes of our lives. By remaining stuck in the power of our wounds, we block our own transformation.
We overlook the greater gifts inherent in our wounds – the strength to overcome them and the wisdom that we are meant to receive through them. Wounds are the means through which we enter the hearts of other people. They are meant to teach us to become compassionate and wise.” ~Caroline Myss
Art • “Favorite Kind of Saturday” by Olga Erokhina @wanderings
(Found on The Soul Journey with Sarah Moussa )
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You know this time of year is often hard on some folks who might be missing loved ones and feeling very alone in their grief; or maybe they are feeling lonely in general or confused at what little they actually ARE or ARE NOT feeling about the holiday season or about their closer friends; or perhaps they are even confused about their own lives and where they seem to be in their living process—confused about the direction of their lives—unsure of where they presently are and where they are going in the future.
Basically I just wanted to say: It’s okay to feel that way.
It’s okay to feel exactly whatever you are feeling. You are being honest about it. Pain is real—physical or emotional/mental.
Sometimes we feel what we feel without the need for a rational explanation. It just is. So it’s okay to feel whatever you are currently feeling, but if you linger in that feeling for days or weeks (or longer), that’s when you get into trouble. That funky feeling becomes a mind-state that is harder to shift out of.
Now about the quote above: I’ve been a Caroline Myss fan for decades, and if you’ve ever heard her videos or audios, you know immediately she is a no-nonsense “Get yourself together!” kind of teacher who does not tolerate slackers or whiners. I like that about her in general. She is to the point, crisp, and sometimes a bit brutal in her assessment of how we should view our lives. A student expressing victimization or openly feeling sorry for him/herself will not remain long in her class. She just won’t put up with it.
But the thing is that in her sharper critique of how to better handle your life challenges, she knows how to shift your perspective out of that funk you are presently immersed in. She knows how to broaden your view on WHY you are here and WHAT you are meant to do with your precious life WHILE here in this life experience.
Therefore to her (and to many, including myself) she views our wounds not as curses or tar-pits in which our feet are hopelessly stuck, but as educational ‘opportunities’ to maximize learning more about ourselves through the experience and learning more about LIFE in general.
In other words, yes, you may feel like the world is swallowing you whole right now BUT if you can stop for a moment and see what this emotion/situation/experience is really showing you about your own resiliency or about your determination to climb out of the tar-pit, or about your flat-out refusal to be beaten down into the dirt by the hardships you are currently experiencing, THEN you can see the VALUE of this particular ‘testing ground’ that your higher spirit has evidently placed you in at the moment. Through enduring the inescapable difficulties facing you, you may be discovering aspects of yourself that you had not previously realized. You are a lot stronger than you give yourself credit for being. You truly are tougher than the challenge and capable of surviving the nastiest of the nasty, if you just keep going and don’t quit until you are through it. You got this!
“We are not meant to stay wounded. We are supposed to move through our tragedies and challenges and to help each other move through the many painful episodes of our lives. By remaining stuck in the power of our wounds, we block our own transformation.
We overlook the greater gifts inherent in our wounds – the strength to overcome them and the wisdom that we are meant to receive through them. Wounds are the means through which we enter the hearts of other people. They are meant to teach us to become compassionate and wise.”
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For all of us, LIFE is one big challenge. Find a way to meet your challenge and move through it. You’ll learn to better trust yourself during the process.
And that is the biggest reward you could ever receive for your unceasing efforts: Learning you have the capability to handle anything that life throws at you. Because you do.