♪ “The snow glows white on the mountain tonight
Not a footprint to be seen ♪
Over the summer, our new puppy was walking in the yard when she suddenly screeched and then started limping. Due to the sheer volume of bees in our grass, we knew immediately that she had gotten stung. Upon examination, we didn’t find anything in her paw so we just watched her closely for the next few minutes.
She continued to pick at her paw and avoided walking on it directly so we knew we needed to investigate further. It took 2 of us to find it but stuck way up inside in between the pads on her paw was a stinger, still very much stuck in her body. But as quickly as we found it, she just as quickly resisted any help and used all the power in her little 4 pound body to push us away and pull her paw away. The stinger was in her front paw so she also had direct biting access to make us stop. Being a puppy, she couldn’t understand that we were just trying to help get to the root of the pain and that by removing the root, we remove the pain. In her mind, we were going towards the pain and that’s the last place she wanted us.
When we are injured, we have 2 choices. The first is to get to the root of the pain and remove the thorn. The second is to deal with the pain and do everything in our power to protect it, numb it and avoid touching it while keeping anyone or anything from aggravating it, just as our puppy did when we tried to find the stinger. Consciously, with physical pain, we all know that taking the stinger out is the obvious solution to pain. If we left it in, the pain could potentially get worse, infected even. The stinger could also still release more venom into my puppy, even after it’s been detached from the bee. Leaving it in would be cruel and cause our sweet Bailey to endure unnecessary and lengthy suffering.
Knowing that animals have an innate ability to take care of themselves, I watched her carefully. She incessantly licked and bit at it, but she just couldn’t get up in between her pads the way she needed to in order to get the stinger out herself. At this point, she continued to limp, lick and attack anything that came near to it. Sometimes the fear of the pain of removing the stinger is greater than the actual pain that we are experiencing in the moment with the stinger still in us… so we resist it.
♪ “A kingdom of isolation
And it looks like I’m the queen ♪
When I finally could see that she wasn’t going to reach it on her own, I took action to remove the stinger. My daughter and I took her into the bathroom, shielded her head from my hands with a towel, held her tight, and as swiftly as possible, used a pair of tweezers to remove the stinger. For those first few moments, Bailey was not happy but as soon as the stinger was removed, she stopped limping and ran all over the yard as if nothing happened. I watched her lick that paw for a few days, trying to work through the pain of healing but it eventually stopped till she was completely pain free.
When we experience pain, we need to find the source and in order to have long term relief, remove the thorn and push through the pain of the healing process. In our outer physical worlds, we all know this to be true. If we don’t find the source, we do everything we can to protect and mask the thorn. We take medications and use other treatments to suppress the pain. We cover it up with bandages so that nothing can irritate it. We even move through the world differently to protect it. In this case, the pain is still there, we are just granted momentary relief until the medication or treatment wears off.
But in our inner worlds, we are doing the exact opposite. Nobody taught us how to remove the thorns in our inner worlds. We were never taught how to listen to our pain. So because of that, we had no choice but to march forward with option 2. We protect the thorns, we build walls, we hide, we keep anyone or anything from coming close to our pain. It’s all we know.
♪ “The wind is howling like this swirling storm inside
Couldn’t keep it in, heaven knows I tried! ♪
In an effort to protect our pain, we often lash out at those around us, just as our puppy did when I tried to remove the thorn. We unintentionally hurt those around us because we are too absorbed in our own pain to notice how our actions affect others. We fear that they are intentionally causing pain when we haven’t yet realized that the pain goes way back, often back to when we were small children. The root is not from the person in front of us but rather from events way in our past. It just so happens that the person in front of us is challenging the very walls we built to protect our pain. We blame others for causing us pain when the real pain stems from our inability to remove our inner thorns. The person in front of us is merely showing up as mirror, to show us that the thorn is still there, to show us that we need to look inside to find and remove the thorn.
♪ “Don’t let them in, don’t let them see
Be the good girl you always have to be
Conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know!♪
In order to fix this, we need to get to the root of the inner pain. In order to get to the root, we have to lean in to the pain. Otherwise, we are repeating patterns generation after generation without taking the time to say wait, this isn’t working for me, I want to do better this time.
“When you know better, you do better.”
~Dr Maya Angelou
I mean seriously, can we just sit with Dr. Angelou for a moment? This may be one of my top 5 most quoted phrases. We use it in our house daily, especially when someone makes a “mistake.” You will see me use it here over, and over, and over again. This quote can be applied anywhere and everywhere. The problem with our culture, is that we don’t seek to know better or do better, we just keep repeating pattern after pattern. We assume that our inner worlds are out of our control, that we don’t have the power to remove those inner thorns. We are taught that our reactions are just part of our personalities. Our culture believes that power comes from the outside, from attaining or controlling. But true authentic power only can come from within. It’s not enough just to say this quote, we have to live it. We have to learn how to KNOW better and then how to DO better.
An awakening is no more than an awareness. Awareness is potential power because it allows you to make different choices…. To do better if you will. We need more choices. For most of my life, I had no idea that I had a choice when it came to my reactions. I’ll share more personal stories in future posts but for now, lets stick with the concept.
We just need to know more, know better, have more awareness in order to take action to do better. This is the essence of sweeping our doorsteps (see previous post here). So how exactly do you know better?
Our Busoulas communicate with us through our emotions. The pain we feel is the magnetic pull of your Busoula telling you that you aren’t facing true North. That pain is a sign, an arrow pointing inward, not outward. The solution to the pain is found in our inner world, not by making changes or controlling our outer worlds. Our Busoula points us there every time.
♪ “Let it go, let it go ♪
The only way to find it is to be still. In that split second between feeling the pain and reacting, we need to be still. Listen to the pain. Ask questions. Ask, when else in my life have I felt like this? Keep asking that question till you can’t go back anymore. When you find the root (sometimes it takes a deeper dive into our subconscious to find the real root, I’ll talk more about that in future posts), then you sit with it. Feel it. Let the feelings that you’ve sucked down your whole life rise to the surface instead of reacting to what’s in front of you to protect the thorn. For me, this often involves crying (who am I kidding, always, it always involves crying). Crying is a release of energy, energy that just wants to be released. Emotions and feelings are just stuck energy in our body, the energy of the feelings that we haven’t dealt with throughout our lives. With smaller things, the thorn might be released through one cycle of this. With deeper thorns and bigger walls, it could take years or happen overnight. It depends on your willingness and understanding of surrender.
If that split second happens too quickly and I still find myself back in the same emotional reaction patterns, I step away as soon as I become aware of it. I take a moment to do the same inner reflecting and see how I can improve the next time. I look to see what needs to be healed and what I’m still holding onto.
Holding onto our thorns ends up hurting us the most but we also hurt the ones around us. In order to remove the thorn, we just need to get to the root and let it go. Surrender the pain. Surrender the stories, the history, the control, the anger, the fear, all of it. Stuck energy is held in our bodies by our thoughts. In order to release, to surrender, to say “I’m not willing to keep wasting my energy to protect this thorn”, we have to be aware of how much pain holding on is causing us and just let it go. It’s amazing to see how much time we really spend protecting those thorns. That’s why it feels so freeing when we finally learn to let go. We free up so much internal energy to use for better purposes.
♪ “It’s funny how some distance, Makes everything seem small
And the fears that once controlled me, Can’t get to me at all! ♪
Letting go can be so, so, so hard at first. If you are following me to this point, you may be thinking, yes Jenn, but this person did this thing and it was just so horrible or this person doesn’t deserve my forgiveness, I’ll never let go. Please understand, I hear you. That’s why the first thing I had to let go of took me years! Thank God I didn’t give up. That’s just our egos talking. Our ego’s job is to keep us safe and our ego needs to keep protecting us. The last thing our egos want us to do is let go. I mean, what would our ego do with all that spare time if its sole job to keep us safe from pain was taken away? How could our ego be sure that removing the walls and removing the thorn would keep us pain free? The truth is, it can’t. We can’t be sure, that’s why we just have to trust. We have to step away from the pain and see it from the 50,000ft level so we can actually see how much pain the thorn is causing us. We have to trust. The more times we learn to trust the process, the more belief we build in the system.
Sometimes those thorns have been a part of us for as long as we remember. We feel like they are part of us, part of our personality. But our personalities are formed as a result of our outer experiences. They too can change and morph as we grow and heal.
The removal of the inner thorns can happen overnight or take a lifetime. For some, like Eckart Tolle, his pain was so excruciating that he had no choice but to surrender and overnight was healed. For others, like me, the surrender is a process. My first thorn took years to remove. The next was a little shorter and so on. Progressively, it gets easier and easier. It’s no different than building a muscle, practice builds competency.
♪ “My power flurries through the air into the ground
My soul is spiraling in frozen fractals all around
And one thought crystallizes like an icy blast
I’m never going back, the past is in the past! ♪
I can’t say my life is completely thorn free but it’s pretty darn close. Its hard to describe what life is like now but really can only be experienced. The amount of energy I exerted to protect my inner pain was enormous. Releasing that pain has freed up so much more mental and spiritual energy to instead focus on creating as opposed to controlling. My power really does flurry through the air into the ground. Those words ring so true for how I feel in my life now.
Instead of building inner walls around my thorns I’ve now built a beautiful energetic shield around me that keeps any thorns from ever even entering. These walls protect my energy. They only allow in love, light, beauty, and gratitude and they deflect out pain, anger, hatred, abuse, etc before it even enters. If any of these negative energies do happen to enter my inner world (I am human after all), I now have the tools to deal with them quickly and efficiently. I’ve built my thorn-removing muscle to a point that is champion worthy. It doesn’t matter what is happening around me or even at me, I am in control of my inner world now. I have the power to say what I will let in, what I will hold onto and what its time to let go of. You do to. We all do, we just need to be aware to take that first step.
♪ “Here I stand, In the light of day
Let the storm rage on ♪
If there’s one lesson we can learn from my sweet puppy (and Elsa), it’s that sometimes we have to brave the short term pain in order to gain the long term freedom. If you too, want to step into your power, you have to find the thorns (and all the armor that you’ve built up to protect them) that have been keeping you from living the life you were born to live. The storm may still be going on, but when we let go of our thorns, they lose their power over us. When our Busoulas are aimed at our North Star, we can ride the pain and know that it’s just the next step closer towards authenticity and wholeness.
♪ “The cold never bothered me anyway!” ♪
Song: “Let it Go” from Frozen written by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez
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