Mostly Annoyed, but Basically Betrayed—But How Do You Really Feel?

            I read a prayer today that was just honest and direct. The prayer talked of feeling the pain of sickness and the tension of anxiety, instead of circumventing it with a belief that it doesn’t exist in the world of God.

            There are plenty of belief systems in the world that would like for you to believe that everything that goes on in your world, you have created either with your thoughts or with your words. To them, I think that there is some validity to what you say, but also balance needed in your thinking.

            Let’s take a scenario such as being born with a disease such as blindness. What mind went ahead of God and created blindness for themselves before he or she had a chance to think about it? Or let’s think about something like 9-11. Is this a result of lots of bad thoughts? Perhaps. If it is, then how could we have avoided personally? Or it is simply reality that comes with a life filled with good and evil?

            When I try to define life with purely “what I sow, I receive,” it becomes one big headache. I know the apostle Paul said that he had to take every thought into captivity. I get it that thoughts count. But I don’t think we are responsible for every thing that goes on in our lives. Other people are responsible for some things and then there is…

            Well, I’d like to think that the Master and Creator of the world is responsible for the plan of mine, your life and the lives of his creations. Even if it isn’t down to the minutia details, I believe—on a wide spectrum—God has a plan for each of our lives. When we go toward the plan, life is a lot safer. When we are walking away from the plan, things tend to happen to draw us to our knees, and perhaps change our plans.

            That is my personal belief. I have nothing to quantify that belief, except a lot of past experiences in my own life. In fact, I have found that almost anything that is annoying or painful in my life, if I just ask the pain why it has come into my life, I can usually get back to being at peace with the answer it gives me.

            For instance: You have a really bad pain in the shoulder. It doesn’t seem to want to go away even after a visit to the doctors and three full-body massages. You might want to sit down and just simply imagine that the pain is a real live person sitting across from you and ask the question: “Pain, is there a reason you are sitting on my shoulder?”

            If you are listening and in the right mind to receive an answer, often you’ll get something like, “You have been shouldering too much in your life. You need to let go of one or more of your scheduled things to do and give yourself more time to rest.”

            I’m simplifying the answer, but that is the idea. Pain in the body has a great way of resting in the place that you need the most help or in the chakra area in which you are having the most problems. Spiritual counselors and healers are trained to look for things like this.

            Sometimes I’ll ask a client if they are feeling a pain somewhere in their body. And the answer will open the door to a healing he or she never expected. This modality of healing is called Gestalt, founded by Frederick (Fritz) and Laura Perls in the 1940s, who created the psychological study.

            Gestalt Therapy teaches therapists and patients the phenomenological (an approach that concentrates on the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience) method of awareness, in which perceiving, feeling, and acting are distinguished from interpreting and reshuffling preexisting attitudes. Explanations and interpretations are considered less reliable than what is directly perceived and felt. Patients and therapists in Gestalt therapy dialogue, that is, communicate their phenomenological perspectives. This dialogue often includes dialogue with the pain itself.

            Differences in perspectives become the focus of experimentation and continued dialogue. The goal is for clients to become aware of what they are doing, how they are doing it, and how they can change themselves, and at the same time, to learn to accept and value themselves.

            Gestalt therapy focuses more on process (what is happening) than content (what is being discussed). The emphasis is on what is being done, thought and felt at the moment rather than on what was, might be, could be, or should be.

            That leads us back to my original thought. What really is important in life is not so much the physical manifestations that happen in our lives. What counts are how we deal with them, feel about them, and act out from them.

            If you are smart, you’ll begin to watch your life as well as live it. In so doing, you can become an observer as well as the dweller of your body. When you do this, you get a very important view of life: a spiritual one—a balanced one—one that includes not only the physical drama, but also what needs to be played out around the drama for you to learn your life’s biggest lessons.