Pain As A Portal To True Freedom

What is TRUE freedom? Is it having everything we want and nothing that we don't? No, then we're either dead or an awakened being. So how do we find it while still alive and fully human? This episode explores a depth of being WITH ourselves and our experiences that is REAL and accessible to us all. It is a radical awakening to the truth of ourselves and what creates our suffering and our freedom.
Please note: This track may include some explicit language.

Transcript

Wake the Fuck Up,

The podcast that mingles mindfulness,

Buddhism,

Brain science,

Evolutionary biology,

And real authentic human experience.

Welcome to Wake the Fuck Up.

Hello,

Amazing humans,

And welcome to this episode of Wake the Fuck Up.

I am Tiffany Andres,

Your host and fellow human traveler.

This episode is all about something I've alluded to probably many times before in past episodes,

The idea of how to be with difficult emotions.

In the self-compassion break the chains of criticism episode,

I talked about the ways in which self-compassion can lean into difficulty,

Discomfort,

Hard experiences,

And in a way I want to start by saying that I have been teaching this for how many years?

Probably eight,

Probably eight years at this point.

I think one of the beautiful things that we discover when we first begin a meditation practice is the felt sense of being able to experience difficult emotions without reacting to them instantaneously.

I know I've said before one of my favorite quotes in regards to mindfulness is a Viktor Frankl quote that says,

Between a stimulus and a response there is a space.

In that space lies our ability to choose,

And in that choice lies our growth and our freedom.

And in a way I see mindfulness as widening that space,

The space between stimulus and a response.

And essentially I would argue that for most of our lives as human beings we're not even responding but reacting.

We've learned these beautiful habitual ways of processing the outer experiences of the world into inner experiences,

Things that have meaning for us through the lens of the past and our selfhood.

We take these impersonal stimuli from outside of us and turn them into a personal story that affects who I am,

Me,

And my in the moment.

Anything that doesn't touch that past experience of self just moves through us in a very quick way,

Right?

And so we're left with these experiences that either are profoundly positive or profoundly negative,

You know,

Really wonderful,

Joy,

Happiness,

Love,

Or really challenging grief,

Loss,

Sadness,

Pain,

Depression,

Suffering.

And all of that is largely what I would argue,

You know,

Maybe 2% of the fullness of the life that we experience.

I imagine if we plotted our life experiences on a graph from most negative to most positive,

We would find that the majority of our experiences fall kind of in the middle.

In essence a bell curve of life.

And what's interesting is that even only neutral experiences that in some way mean something to us that we imbue with meaning,

And this is kind of alluding back to episode 19 I believe,

Which is the meaning in life,

The idea that no experience,

No stimulus outside of us or even inside of us carries any inherent meaning.

We imbue absolutely everything we experience with meaning and we do that by what's relative to our sense of self,

To our historical past,

To what we desire for ourselves in the future.

And I really want to focus in this episode on how we lean in to the moments that are hard or painful.

Our last episode was suffering connects us all.

And in talking to a friend last night,

We were sharing the reality that as much as we would love through the practice of meditation and mindfulness and awakening and softening and opening and being tender in every single moment for it to mean that we never suffer.

But the truth is that's not what it means to be human.

And I think as well the truth is that it's the contrast between our difficult moments and the wonderful ones that make them taste and feel even more viscerably and palpably delicious when we have something good happen to us.

I love the Khalil Jarmaran quote,

The deeper sorrow carves into your being,

The more joy you can contain,

Our willingness to feel the painful,

Difficult moments of our life creates even more depth with which we can be filled with the things that are beautiful.

Like I said,

I've been talking for years about the ability to do this,

You know,

And I want to start I think by saying that everything in this experience of being human is a process of growth and learning and expansion and new understanding.

So what I desire to offer today is an expansion of growth of the path and the process that has unfolded for me and understanding how to be with myself in these moments of deep suffering.

What I'll offer is through the experience of the last few months,

Which I would self identify in some way as the absolute most painful experiences I've ever had in my life.

I was granted a moment of being with myself and my suffering in a way that felt completely new.

And I will share for those of you that have a loud self critic like I do sometimes,

You know,

That's one of those habitual ways of thinking and being that it just takes time to let go of that the very first thought I had when I had this experience was,

Well,

Shit,

I've been missing it all these years.

And I had to remind myself of the beautiful gift that my incredible grandmother gave to me many,

Many years ago.

I came to her at a time when I was new to meditation and mindfulness was probably a couple years after I had gone to the monastery for the first time.

And I remember telling her,

Bunny,

I can't get myself to meditate every day.

I know how good it is for me.

I want to be doing it.

It's like,

I see the path that I want to be walking on.

And I'm standing one step to the left.

And I can't convince myself to just take that one step to the right and be on the path that I know I want to be on.

And her response,

This is eight or nine years ago at this point has stuck with me forever,

That everything is the path.

Oh,

My sweetheart.

Everything is the path.

And I have learned to deeply trust that and understanding that the years I spent not practicing every single day,

The energy of that is exactly what I lean into on the days where something inside of me goes,

No,

I don't want to meditate today.

And I already know what that experience is like.

I walked the path of inconsistency in my practice.

And so it's not a forcing or having to or should.

It's a gift and an offering that I give myself every single day from having walked the path of inconsistency to give myself the gift of consistency.

So everything is the path.

And I share that because as I offer this idea of how to be with ourselves in these moments of pain and suffering,

I want to offer that you'll walk your own path.

And it becomes so much more challenging to be with ourselves as we suffer if we're constantly judging how well we're doing it.

And I'm so guilty of that.

I'm so aware these days that so many of my self care air quotes practices,

The things I engage in to take care of and love on myself actually became ways of fixing myself.

And this is the first thing that I want to offer when we talk about being with ourselves in any moment of suffering or discomfort.

The very first and most profound thing that I want you to hear is our goal cannot be to fix ourselves in those moments.

And that is so hard,

My dears.

Oh,

It's so challenging because all we want everything inside of us desires to just feel better.

And what a beautiful offering that is.

There is something inside of you going,

You deserve my dear to feel better than this,

Please help make it better.

And that's not bad.

That's beautiful,

Right?

But the interesting powerful thing about the energy of emotions and the energy of experiences is that they are changing all of the time on their own.

It's a moving,

Living,

Breathing energy.

The stimulus comes into your body through the senses,

Right?

It's transformed into literal kinetic,

Energetic energy.

That energy is moving.

When we trap it in our bodies as emotions,

As thoughts,

That energy is swirling,

It's still moving,

But it's still going to go somewhere all on its own.

Naturally,

It's going to change.

I think for so many of us,

Myself included,

The thing that traps us in our emotions is the fear that we're going to be stuck in them forever.

But if you think about a two year old or three year old or four year old,

They can go from the most frustrated,

Angry,

Upset,

Throwing a complete temper tantrum,

Having an absolute meltdown and five minutes later they can be playing and happy like nothing ever happened.

We as adults have the same capacity within us.

What's different is that our conscious,

Logical mind kicks in to say,

Get the fuck rid of this.

And we do everything we possibly can,

We use everything in our tool belt to get rid of how we're feeling.

But in essence,

What we're doing as soon as we do that is rejecting fundamentally who we are,

How we are,

And how we're experiencing life in that moment.

And my loves,

It is the rejecting that keeps us there.

So I want to share a little of my story with you to maybe help ground the understanding of what I mean when I say the practice,

The path,

The thing to lean into is to not reject at all,

But to notice every single moment of discomfort as just something inside of you,

Asking for your own attention.

Something in you is saying,

Please,

In this moment,

I need to be held,

Whether it's quiet and soft or loud and screaming is completely irrelevant.

The same way we would go to a screaming child and pick them up and hold them in their arms,

Shush them,

Tell them we love them and it's going to be okay.

And we feel discomfort and distress that in so much truth,

My loves,

And please don't trust me,

Do it yourself is all that we need.

So I'll share that six months ago,

My beautiful,

Incredible,

Wondrous wife and I separated.

There was a hopefulness of healing and coming back together that within a month or two became very clear was not going to be the case.

For me,

The end of this relationship felt like a death in ways I didn't even understand then it was a dying.

It was a dying of a me,

A story of myself that I had built around 10 years of a life.

It was the death of that life that was built over 10 years.

It was the loss and death of a family unit,

My wife,

Myself,

My son,

Our two dogs that had been built over those 10 years as well.

And in a way it was a death of my wife,

The woman that I loved.

She and I were changing.

I was dying.

She was dying.

I was being reborn,

Becoming something new and so was she.

The process of grief is not something I have ever experienced to this degree before.

Perhaps I can acknowledge that it's a tremendous blessing that I still have all of my parents here with me.

Family members that I'm incredibly close to have yet to pass and in that way this was the first experience of true loss and grieving that I've ever really had.

There were so many moments and months where self-compassion carried me through,

Where just being kind to myself was the only thing that worked.

But it was not until about two months ago when I decided to go skydiving.

Actually this was back in April.

I decided to go skydiving and the first time I did a solo skydive,

About 30 seconds before the plane door opened,

My fight or flight system kicked all the way in.

I was not prepared.

I thought that I was going to pass out and I looked over at my instructor and all I wanted to do was crawl into his arms in the fetal position and have him hold me.

And in that moment what I realized was that I just wanted to be held.

I wanted to know I was okay and safe and that something,

Someone,

Somewhere was going to take care of me.

And this is the moment where I'll remind us that everything is the path,

That what we practice grows stronger because in that moment I was gifted with a quiet voice inside of my heart that said,

My dear,

I can hold you.

I can hold you.

This is exactly what we're learning and practicing in life right now,

That we can do this alone.

I took a breath and I said it consciously from my mind instead of my heart,

I'm here.

I can hold you.

And I jumped out of that plane door.

The next time I went to jump,

I felt immense nerves,

No fight or flight,

Thank goodness,

But I still felt scared.

And the second quiet whispering of my heart sitting on that plane before the door opened was I trust you.

I trust myself fully to carry myself through this experience.

It might be hard,

It might be good,

It might be somewhere in between,

But regardless of what it looks like,

I trust myself to hold myself through it.

My words to myself became,

I love you.

I'm here.

I'm here.

I'm here.

Not too long after that experience of skydiving and learning to hold and trust myself in those moments of fear,

I was presented with an experience as my ex and I work through divorce and child custody and all the untangling that happens when you separate 10 years of an intertwined life.

I was presented with an experience that caused me immense anxiety and fear and uncertainty.

Essentially,

I was making the decision not to have any more communication with this person that I love so deeply.

Outside of talking about our son and the divorce,

We were going to move away from having any other kind of connection.

Given that we still talked every single day,

Multiple times a day,

That we were leaning into each other in our moments of pain and hurt,

She was still a place of safety and holding for me,

I felt a lot of fear.

And I probably spent about three days staving off a panic attack.

I was in the middle of a work trip and presenting to 350 law enforcement officers the ideas of mindfulness and well-being.

So having a panic attack in that moment did not feel like an appropriate time.

And it was not until three days into the experience that I realized that as much as I was using every single tool in my toolkit,

Self-compassion,

Telling myself I was there,

Telling myself it was okay,

It's okay to feel this way,

Of course you feel this way,

Positive self-talk,

That this feeling was not going away.

And it wasn't going away because I didn't want to feel it.

It wasn't going away because I had my hands in front of my heart and as much as I could,

I was just guarding from having to feel the full experience.

In that moment,

I remembered the plain door.

I love you.

I'm here.

Sweetheart,

I'm here.

I hear you.

And everything softened.

All I needed was to be there with myself.

I sobbed,

My body tingled,

Pulsed,

Vibrated,

My heart opened,

My mind softened,

And it felt good.

It felt not just okay,

But so healing to actually feel,

To really feel what a beautiful fucking capacity we have as human beings to feel so deeply.

And my love,

There is something so confusing and strange and profound about what happens when we just show up for ourselves without needing how we are in that moment to change,

When we are just there to truly hold ourselves regardless of the experience.

What happens is freedom.

We can hold ourselves in absolutely every moment.

This experience happened for me in May.

I'm producing this at the beginning,

Kind of middle of August.

So three months.

And in three months,

There has not been a single experience,

Even with all of the tumultuousness,

The difficulty of still experiencing custody issues and arguments,

Divorce issues and arguments,

Disconnection,

Being mirrored in incredibly painful ways,

Unexpected life changes and circumstances,

Experiencing the suffering of those that I love around me.

Even through all of that,

There has not been one single experience that has shaken me deeply to my core,

Because in every moment,

Whether it's a joy or a suffering,

I know I am capable of holding myself.

In every single moment discomfort arises,

Quiet and subtle,

Or large and loud.

The practice is to turn toward ourselves.

I hear you place a hand at the heart.

I love you.

I'm here.

Again,

I want to end with just the reminder that in a way we really have to mean this.

We can show up with these words and I did it 1000 fucking times.

We can show up with these words.

And if our intention if our hope is to get rid of how we feel,

We're not really showing up.

I also want to remind you that everything is the path.

Everything is practice.

If you can't feel this right away,

Do not judge yourself.

I sit here 10 years into my meditation practice,

And I am recording this episode because of how profound this shift of experience feels in my life.

It took me 10 years.

I heard the words turn towards hold yourself,

Treat yourself with reverence,

Be kind.

But the way we change our mind is softly over time.

By seeing the habitual ways we close ourselves off from ourselves and others and learning to let those soften over time.

To think we can radically change our paradigm in a moment is yet another form of judgment and expectation.

Be kind to yourselves in your process.

Know that I love you.

I'm here with you and holding you and find your own language for whatever it looks like to hold yourself.

My words are,

I hear you.

I love you.

Oh,

Sweet one.

I'm here.

I'm here.

Thank you so much for listening.

I wish you peace,

Gentleness,

Tenderness,

And an open heart in every moment.

I hope you discover the capacity to not need to change yourself or your experiences in any moment,

But to learn to hold yourself,

To see every single discomfort as a whisper for your own attention and simply to show up.

You deserve it.

Reviews

That’s a really good observation. It is all the path, good and not so good. Be your own best friend. 🙏