How do you reach a higher state of inner peace from a state of deep emotional pain? Here are the 5 rungs of the ladder I suggest to make your way up. The key is to genuinely process one rung of the ladder fully before moving onto the next.
1.Allow for your own pain, make room for it within—not necessarily making it more than what it is, but not making it less than what it is either. There is nothing to do but to simply allow for what is felt. This is not the time to provide yourself with solutions or force yourself to feel better.
2. Validate your own pain, even validate the desire to escape from pain hastily. Take the time to understand and give voice what you view as your negative thoughts and feelings to yourself, even to the stigmatized emotions of sadness and anger. See where they are coming from.
3. Access the means you use to cope and provide yourself self-care. Remind yourself of the ways you made progress in your life even in small ways and see the good in yourself. Express empathy and kindness for yourself and provide yourself with encouragement.
4. Begin understanding the situation in broader terms, outside of your own perspective. We often rush into doing this; however, it is more helpful to do the previous steps first, as they remove resistance. Use the empathy you gave to yourself earlier to empathize with a person you may have conflict with. Use the understanding you provided yourself earlier to understand the situation more objectively.
5. See what you experience as connecting to a greater sense of purpose. How does the pain you feel help you connect with the human experience as a whole and have compassion for others’ pain? What does this experience teach you in terms of personal growth? Often pain allows us to remember our values or create new ones, as we decide how we treat others or how to go about life differently. Now you can create the next small step to move ahead, and encourage yourself along your journey. Here, you can experience pain while simultaneously experiencing peace.
While experiencing emotional pain, we often want to make a heroic leap out of it up into a higher perspective on our struggles, to immediately relieve ourselves of the hell of its trappings. We hunger for that calm and enlightened state of being to satiate us, to relieve that pain as if we can scratch it away like an itch. This makes total sense; who does not thirst for a fresh breath of air when one is feeling drowned in a sea of troubles?
When we want to jump levels without processing the lower ones fully, it becomes harder to remain at a higher level reliably and we can easily fall back down. Something within us will resist us cheating the process—and rather than a negative, resistance teaches us. Processing each rung of the ladder is key for the next one, as it eases resistance that blocks us from going higher up.
However, when we are fixated on our desire to hastily reach a higher state of being, this is attachment. It does not help, because we end up focusing on the gap between where we are and “the perfect perspective” we believe we should be at and not the process of healing itself.
The key to reaching a higher state of being from a state of inner emotional pain is to meet ourselves where we are at, and then work our way up one rung of the ladder at time, until the higher state is accessible to us. Enlightenment is in the process of working with ourselves, not just the end state. Acceptance of where we are at in the moment, patience with the process of inner work, and taking things a step at a time are lessons are values when it comes to any skill. We do not to leap into mastery; mastery is the process itself of working up one step at a time with a skill. However, when it comes to the inner world, we expect wisdom to mean immediately turning on a higher state of being like a switch.
Going up levels of self-realization is a creative process. We tend to want to control our emotional state in a black-and-white way, and even if we use great force to do so in order to reach self-realization, it fails to succeed. It causes us to exhaust ourselves and lose control. As you climb upwards, you creatively use what you process from an earlier level as fuel to process the next level up. For instance, you first provide self-empathy, and then use that empathy later to transfer it to others, rather than force yourself to do it for others. You first process your pain without trying to see a higher perspective on it first, and then later it will be much easier to see how interpret your pain in the light of a higher sense of purpose. It is like how a martial artist can use the energy of his opponent against him or her, you do the same with a lower level to go up to a higher level.
