Here, have a question that will implode your reality.
When my energy healer said this to me on Friday night, my brain went KABLAM. Like a cartoon frog being catapulted into outer space via rocket launcher.
That question is still sending ripples reverberating through my reality, a surprised green amphibian ricocheting through the continuum of Amber.
“What if you didn’t need to suffer?”
My god, what would I do with all that extra time?
Until the moment the question was asked, I didn’t realize how much of my experience was colored by suffering.
My thoughts, my feelings - basically the entirety of my internal reality.
The only time I’m not suffering is when I’m channeling, writing, dancing, eating, or maybe having sex.
But I want those times to be marked by joy, not the absence of suffering. My god.
I blame it all on my brain, of course. And that ever-pesky empath thing.
My brain throws a royal fit every time I expand. Since I’m expanding pretty much all the time right now, my brain is in a near constant state of flip-out. (Which is good, but when I’m mid-flip-out, I don’t remember that it’s good, so I just panic.)
Being an empath doesn’t help. Because so many other people in this world are suffering and I am picking up on it, simply by existing and doing things in the world. Things I can’t avoid. Like getting groceries. I do a pretty good job at being a hermit, but even hermits need potato chips.
What if I didn’t need to suffer?
What if I don’t need to suffer, just because everyone else is? What if I don’t need to suffer, just because my family did? What if I don’t need to suffer, just because the world says I do?
What if none of us need to suffer?
[KABLAM]
I know the answer is already floating around me. We always have the answer the moment the question is formulated. But my brain is still trying to catch up.
In this moment, I know the answer is breathe. Sink into your body, let your soul take the reins. Give your brain a break. This will allow a fuller understanding to come in, and the suffering to unravel and loosen and eventually drift away, leaving me in a different state of being.
When I was talking about this last night, I was asked: “What’s the opposite of suffering?”
I didn’t have a ready answer.
Peace? Joy? Neutrality?
Being?
I can’t think my way through this one. Thinking is more or less how I got into this mess in the first place. I can only be.
Trust the be-ingness of it all to unwind whatever suffering is woven throughout my experience, leaving freedom and, I don’t know, aliveness in its wake.
Some would argue that to be alive is to suffer. I would have probably been one of them. But I’m not sure I want to subscribe to that any more. I’m not sure it’s necessary.
What if we don’t need to suffer? What then? What opens up? What else can we experience?
The answers are still assembling, but I’m sure as hell ready to find out.
Cascade Falls in Mill Valley, California: a good place to go to not suffer.