Buddha said Life is Suffering. This didn’t mean much to me beyond a philosophical assertion to be dissected in class at university. That was, until 2006, when my ‘awakening’ cracked open a process of pain release I’d never imagined possible. I came from an academic and politically oriented background, so things like “kundalini” and ‘spiritual emergence’ were well outside my reference for life and living. Suddenly, my life became about managing pain surging out of my body daily, intensifying over the years. Few understood, and fewer could explain it, and all my intellectual mind wanted was to know what was going on and why. Soon after this sudden shift, I became a holistic psychotherapist, which spontaneously unleashed a process upon my clients many refer to as shamanic healing or transmutation. After years of seeing, moving, and transforming pain, I discovered that Buddha may have been onto something more than just fascinating intellectual fodder.
I have spent the last 17 years spontaneously transforming, releasing, and becoming very intimate with suffering. Physical, emotional, and energetic suffering. Suffering I’ve never experienced nor identified in this life. I shift pain. Pain that once moved through my physical and emotional being immediately and effortlessly impacts my perceptions, behaviors, and relationship with myself and the world. Years of suffering, years of shifting. Suffering that is here one second and gone the next. This soon led me to ask, “If pain is here and then gone, can it be real?”
I Became Aware
I saw a shift that, naturally and unintentionally, moved from feelings of fear, shame, and rage towards alternating glimpses and explosions of compassion, love, and profound connection. I became aware. My awareness revealed that many of us, maybe most of us, have been living in a reality immersed in, sculpted by, and defined by pain and discomfort. While it isn’t difficult to look around and find a discouraging amount of evidence for our reasoning minds to succumb to that logic, I now see, feel, and experience daily that the suffering goes beyond what we currently know to be suffering. This suffering goes beyond what we “do” to each other or what is “happening” to us. That, in fact, etched within our bodies are the ancient markings of the many colorful ways humans have tormented each other for thousands of years. This is suffering that is not occurring in the now but is historic and yet creeps in to be allowed to influence, alter, and redefine the now. So much so that I suggest we have no idea what is happening now.
These Repressed Emotions Exist
In mainstream research, we uncover the impact of our ancestors’ pain on our reality by studying epigenetics and intergenerational trauma. And then there’s the largely accepted layers of karma—past-life trauma—that we may also be toting around. Or these may all be the same thing. In any case, what the research and my experience seem to suggest increasingly is that we exist under countless layers of fear, shame, rage, guilt, grief, disgust, and jealousy—held in our muscles, our joints, our nervous systems, and encoded in our DNA. Thus creating our core beliefs, perceptions, and behaviors. All these repressed emotions, perceptions, and beliefs are a bountiful basket of PTSD guiding our collective and individual decision-making. This is pain that is picking our jobs, our partners, our politicians, and our fights. These repressed emotions exist beyond our awareness, abandoned through our ancient denial and avoidance coping strategies.
I then asked myself, could all of this pain be or be part of what many of us understand to be The Veil? Is this part of our individual and collective state of unseeing that we have been living under in this current uncomfortable reality?
How Do We Release the Suffering?
If so, then what is the antidote? How do we release the suffering? How do we pull back the Veil? Well, I believe that’s what we are here to learn to do. We are here to partake in the creative process of expansion. Expansion is to bring awareness into all of the hidden, repressed, contracted, and abandoned places within our beings. A deep, thorough application of unconditional seeing. It is to bring acceptance and love into the forgotten and rejected parts of ourselves to bring them into the whole. It is a hearty delivery of the energy of consciousness directed into our bodies. Into our landscapes. Into our reality. We deliver the energy of profound seeing, which we happen to feel in our bodies as love, a lightness that unclenches the contracted pained parts within. That is what I have been spontaneously delivering to myself and sharing with my clients for the last 12 years. That is what we are developing—a deeper, limitless way of seeing that most of us have not accessed to date.
Light, Love & Deep Seeing
I suggest that our pain, our stories of suffering stuck from our ancient past, are persistent in their urgings, telling us that we are under threat. And we recycle that signal of threat within and upon each other. Our evolutionary path is to deliver the energy of consciousness and love to each one of those hidden pain stories that bring us back into the present and step out of our unconscious habit of cycling pain. To see the stories and them fully, compassionately, and with complete acceptance. We are learning to do this more rapidly, powerfully, and in greater numbers than ever before. While pain stories are surging and spiraling around the globe, a parallel world of expanding light, love, and deep seeing is occurring under the radar of chaos. Because, of course, chaos doesn’t see love. But I ask you to see that there is nothing really happening. Only our pain is trying to tell us there is.
Antonia is a registered holistic psychotherapist, Ayurvedic Counsellor, Yoga and Meditation Teacher, and author with her new publication Dismantling the 3rd Dimension: Transforming our Trauma on the Road from Tribe to Collective. Antonia resides in Canada, working with clients one-on-one and in groups. In her work, she is committed to assisting people in releasing the delusions that anchor us in our pain reality.
To learn more about Antonia’s work, visit > Tribe Collective
Leave a Reply