Your pain doesn’t need to be “bad enough” to “count”

I’m emerging from one of the most challenge seasons of my life. A season of profound healing, pain, and rebirth. A time I wouldn’t have chosen and yet am profoundly grateful to have experienced nonetheless.

There will be times when life takes you to your knees, when the air leaves your lungs and your head spins and the world as you knew it turns upside down.  It might be a loss, a heartbreak, a disaster, or a diagnosis. It might be something that seems relatively benign to the outside world. 

The events that have most profoundly impacted me seem ludicrous when I say them out loud, like the time I lost my phone and found God in New Orleans or when an allergy headache kicked off an 8 week existential crisis where had to face my own mortality.

The catalyst need not make sense. What happens doesn’t matter, what matters is the way it affects you and your perception of yourself and your place in this world. 

When we’re committed to spiritual and emotional growth, we must be willing to let go of the beliefs, patterns, and stories that no longer serve us. We’ll be show exactly what we need to let go of in order to find whatever it is we’re searching for. When this happens, pay attention.

I see now how I resisted the lessons for years. How the Universe was trying to show me where I was in my own way, how I was asking for one thing and doing another. The lessons get louder until we listen, often forcing us to sit down, shut up, and surrender.

If you find yourself at a point in your life where it feels like things are falling apart, where what has worked is no longer working or where you don’t know how to keep moving forward, it feels like life has handed you a beat down and God has forgotten you, I promise, he hasn’t.

• I couldn’t learn to trust and rely upon God when I was relying on myself…I had to feel totally lost, hopeless, and completely out of control before I could surrender control. 
• I couldn’t appreciate the majesty of an ordinary moment (always seeing today as a stepping stone to somewhere better) until panic attacks reminded me there is nothing, NOTHING more important than feeling safe and at peace.
• I couldn’t learn to hear, trust, and follow my own inner guidance until I was forced to navigate my way through the streets of New Orleans and the way home across the country on faith alone.
• I couldn’t have know that I don’t need my business to succeed until I flopped a really important launch and “shockingly” survived unscathed.

Every single time I felt lost, afraid, alone, and certain life as I knew it was imploding, I realizing the only thing I ever lost was the control I never had in the first place. I lost the illusions and delusions that were not serving me.

Growth is hard.

Old ways of navigating in the world must die to make space for the new and death is painful.

So is birth.

But remember this, pain comes with purpose and it isn’t reserved only for those who have suffered unimaginable loss. 

Your pain doesn’t need to be “bad enough” to “count”. 

Pain is personal. Pain is pain, regardless.

You are allowed to feel angry, to be hurt, to be sad, to grieve, to curse, to scream at whatever hurts.

Let the pain bring forth the change, the healing, and the growth that is trying to find its way through you. Let it in, let is lead, let it show you what you have been resistant to learn.