Beyond Wellness; Facing Adversity and Creating Space for Pain.

We all are currently and have been faced with unsurmountable amounts of adversity and uncertainty these past few years. Wellness practices can be effective tools in navigating intense feelings of overwhelm, calming the body, and nervous system. However what happens when you can't meditate away the grief, you can't outrun the exesitential dread, and mindfulness doesn't resolve the anger? And yes, you have tried breathwork, at the end of the five minutes of sqaure breathing your'e back in the soup.

Melting Form 18x24" Acrylic on stretched canvas 2012

I am not bashing these tools, I actually love these techniques and use them on the regular. I am lucky enough to have access to the above to help me connect to my body and navigate various neurotic states of mind, panic attacks, depression, body alignments what have you; and yes! If you have access to these things, that can make an exponential difference in your mental, physical, and spiritual health. I always make the joke that my silly little mental health walks are the thread that holds me together. Having go-to ways of grounding yourself are incredible, by all means, keep it up!

However this is not an article to educate or instruct you on the benefits of breath work, yoga, walking in nature, sleep hygiene, and eating a perfect ayurvedic diet synced with a perfect circadian rhythm and no screen time before bed.

They do help, yet they are not a solve all. This article isn't written to give you a solve all. This I have written to give you a cord back to center in the hardest moments.

The moments where the grief of the current times completely buckles your knees and brings you to the floor, the moments where you can't get out of bed because your very blood feels like lead. The moments that your anxiety is so bad you can't seem to leave the house to go get groceries let alone breath in a square because the slightest task feels like an avalanche of debilitating thought spirals. I am writing this for when a relationship ends and your entire reality collapses. When your taken over by a illness or pain in your body that is unsurmountable, and your future is unimaginable. When your trust in the systems, institutions, and religions are demolished and you are free falling through the groundless ground, unknowing who you are and how to move forward. I am writing for the moments without answers, for the you that doesn't need solving, that doesn't need one more damn fix for where you are, for the parts of you crumbling that just need holding.

What if your pain is your path?

That sounds exhausting in some ways, but this question is more based in the perspective that all pain, is temporary, and all pain, is a signal.

Easier to say when you're not in it, sure. However, I remember distinctly this echoing through my head in the midst of a very excruciating moment I was in before I left an abusive relationship a few years ago. It made sense in that moment viscerally; I was shaking, curled in a ball, I was scared, I was shattered, and my body was sick from the situation.

Yet a part of me knew, I would survive, and I would live to tell the tale, and that the tale would be a bridge to others that had survived or were surviving something similar.

That was one of the many moments I felt I would be crushed under my current circumstances. Surviving adversity created who I am today, the strong parts, and the scarred parts that feel weaker than I was before. The pain was signaling to me that something was wrong, and I needed to shift.

These experiences both build and break you at the same time.

Dissolving 18x24" Acrylic on stretched canvas 2013

There is resilience built from hardship, and I want to drive home the point that your pain also doesn't have to become some trophy of heroic alchemy. It can just be your pain. You don't have to rush out of it, you don't have to hurry up and heal to become some better version of yourself.

You also don't have to make a home there, you don't have to make it your identity and you don't have to let it define you. If your are numb and just going through the motions, create space for that, If you want to move on and not think about it, there is also room for that. The only thing I am advocating for is allow space for all states of being, for your entire lived experience.

The body remembers, and the goal isn't to rid the body of what it remembers. The resolve comes when you can allow all parts to be true. Knowing, validating that the pain was real, is real, and there are other pieces of you that are not the pain. You may have trauma, and you are more than experiences that felt like they destroyed you. You can rise like a Phoenix from the fire and ashes, and still remember, still include the parts of you that experienced being burned. It's not I am this, or I am that. It's I am this, and I am that; and this too.

It is the path you're on, is your path, the pain and the joy; the laughter, and the tears.

Trauma is created when there is fragmentation of the self, when we compartmentalize and pathologize parts of us as being good or bad, it also happens in social isolation when we are cut off from others, when we feel alone in our experience, misunderstood, or our reality denied, belittled, or distorted. Trauma tells you it is only dark, you will never get out, there is something fundamentally wrong with you, and you won't survive.

What healing actually is

Let's first look at the word healing. I don't believe in the word healed. Unless you are talking about a superficial scrape that doesn't leave a scar, there are very few circumstances in which a person reaches this type of finality. Healing is a process, a continuum. It isn't some arbitrary point in the future where you are now complete and there is no work to be done.

It's a cycle, and on an individual and collective scale, we expand and contract, we have moments of ease and then tension again.

If you look at the history of humanity, we have gone through very many stages of waking up, getting closer to harmony with ourselves and each other, and collapse or contraction where we forget, become separate, we go against ourselves, we go against each other. There are wars and violence that ensue; current systems or ways of being that inherently become toxic due to the incoherency with truth eventually fracture, fray, and crumble; thus the current times.

Many may say this is the end of times.

I prefer to see it as the end of how times have been, and in that there is a lot of rupture, separation, and turmoil. I am lucky enough not be on the frontlines, yet I can feel it, it hurts, I definitely don't know how to hold this in it's entirety.

However, what I have had a lot of practice in is grief, losing my father in my youth acquainted me with how temporary this all is very early on. The crumbling, crippling, and devouring. The unsolvable shattering, the unimaginable pain strikes the very core of you, the type of crying where you can't even gasp for air. The void left in the wake of your despair.

And what I know from this is there is not solving, only turning toward these experiences and letting them move through you, only allowing the process to unfold. Knowing that as long as your alive, there will always be more of you to meet.

I practice opening to each and every part of me, and the more inclusion I have for myself, the more I am able to remain open to life, the world, and the path forward, even if I am stumbling through the fog, caught in a riptide, or washed up on shore.

The more I open to the depths in me, the more I can meet you.

The form of what was is always dissolving, yet as one thing dies, another is born.

I am happy to be walking this path together,

Thanks for reading

-Olivia