Beauty and The Pain

Yesterday I was witness to an amazing experience that I believe was heightened by 27 consecutive days of a new yoga practice. I have spent hours retraining my breath and listening to my body while twisting and bending into purposefully expanding postures. Without it, I may not have arrived at the healing destination that took place on a long drive home, after a long and arduous day.

It only took three words to cut through me like a knife. Cast out through the snarled lips of the past, and out of the mouth of one of my greatest teachers in this life. Those three words triggered a painful history, leaving tears welled up and hovering at the edge of my lower eyelids. Held back like high-water at the dam's edge.

More than the words themselves, it was my surprise reaction to them. And as I enter my sixth decade in life's classroom, this particular assignment continues to keep me after school. The curriculum has been a coarse one and today's lesson sat waiting patiently behind my tears and blurred vision, as I stepped behind the wheel for the welcome drive home.

I took a different route home than was usual. One less congested and stop sign free allowing for an ease in driving. In that freedom, the day's concluding event replayed in my mind offering fully the effects of the opened wound, bleeding and raw. Recently read passages from my new favorite contemporary philosophical author, Mark Nepo, reminded me to feel these moments fully. And so I did. This, in tandem with my return to a yoga practice, had opened me to locating visceral experiences happening inside my body.

I could feel the pain, the hurt, so intensely as it first circled the area around my heart, taking a route traveling down the path along the spine, through the pelvis, reaching even further down the legs, and coming to rest at a tingling in my toes. By my own calculations about 80% of my body was fully engaged in the feelings of emotional pain—all at the same time. Connected and unyielding, heart to toes.

With a single blink of my eyes, the dam broke. In the very next moment, what laid before me, in the expanse of the sky was an unobstructed sunset in the making. I could feel my soul switching its gears, moving past the pain and into appreciation for the beautiful gift of nature. These words, like a yogi's mantra chanting in my mind, "This is real. This is the only thing that is real. Thank you." The feelings of emotion in this raw and open state, as I breathed in the expanse of sky and beauty of color, allowed the eyes of my soul to see beyond the pain of the previous moment.

I could feel the expression of joy in this moment so intensely as it first circled the area of my heart, taking a route traveling down the path along the spine, through the pelvis, reaching even further down the legs, and coming to rest at a tingling in my toes. Sound familiar? Yes! If I may answer my own question. The same physical experience of deeply rooted emotions around hurt, located in the depths my heart connected to the bottom of my toes, were exactly what I had experienced in the raw moment of appreciating beauty.

The lines completely blurred between beauty and pain. The heart-to-sole channels cracked open wide. The path of pain and fresh wound followed directly by the healing bandage of beauty. Perhaps it was in that order, or maybe it was happening simultaneously, I'm no longer sure.

What I do know or witnessed for myself is, created through beauty or pain, the sensations were the same. And with that, I believe I have found a tool for future healing. When the heart is broken open there exists an open portal of opportunity to seek the bounty of beauty that surrounds us, to sooth the wound when broken open or anew.

Consider this...it might just work for you too.