Lessons From Pain: the permanence of impermanence

I feel guided to write about a theme that has been coming up in my life a lot lately, and it’s the idea of permanence and impermanence.

Fear of change is such a pervasive concept, that I’m not even sure we understand, fully, how it manifests in our lives. I was talking to my friend Angela (not her real name to protect her privacy) regarding the impermanence of things and how we become so attached to ideas of permanence that we forget how much of a blessing change is, can be, and how easy it is to change.

Angela’s dilemma stems from the heart, as the person whom she loves recently purchased a home a significant distance away from where she lives at the moment. She asked me, “Does this mean he’s planning a life without me in it?”

“Of course not!” I say. “He’s simply establishing himself somewhere.”

We further discuss the fact that this guy is in the midst of a job transition and has a lot of things that are up in the air. The ‘permanence’ of having a home may be the only thing stabilizing him at the moment, and so who would we be to judge his ideation of what the future has in store?

But I have to give credit to her concerns, as often times we allow ourselves to envision the future and consider what it would take now—in the present moment—to manifest that future dream. Does it mean we start saving today to buy that house in a few years? Does it mean we start a new education program because we want to serve in another profession in our future? Does it mean we start dating someone else because the one you love says that they can’t commit? Does it mean you start opening yourself up to love because you want a family someday?

Surely, if we want to create a future, we must decide today what that future will look like, and we have to commit to working in each moment to create it. However, this is where the paradox of permanence and impermanence exists, for if you set your sights so tightly upon a specific future or specific pathway on how you’re going to get there, you may be setting yourself up for failure. You may be setting yourself up for undue pain and suffering because to hold onto something so tightly also permits you to feel sad or disappointed when things don’t go exactly as you had planned.

Plans. Those lovely and tricky things. It’s nice to think someone plans to have you in their life. It’s nice to know that the one you love wants to plan to spend time with you. It’s nice to believe that each planned encounter or step forward will bring you to your ultimate vision of the future. Yet, I push back and challenge this concept: what if your plans were just a teeny, tiny bit of the bigger picture? What if your plans were so tightly wound that they didn’t allow you the highest and best opportunities that the universe really has in store for you? What if the universe had these amazingly beautiful things to offer you, but you didn’t see them because you weren’t planning on things unfolding this way? Each time our plans are dashed, it’s an opportunity to ask yourself “what might the universe bring me today?” Each time our hopes or extinguished, it’s time to surrender and imagine that, perhaps, something bigger, brighter and better is in store, but we may not see it just yet.

We’ve been taught to assume life follows a particular pattern, and so we attach ourselves to it and its supposed “permanence.” Allow me to provide an example:

We grow up learning that the best way to manifest an adulthood is to do the following, in this order:

1. Go to college or get a job.
2. Date.
3. Get married.
4. Buy a house.
5. Have children.
6. Save for retirement.
7. Retire.
8. Have family/children to help take care of you when you get old.
9. Die.

Okay—perhaps I’m being a little overly dramatic about simplifying that life plan, but you get the point. There is a sequence to things that we’ve been taught, is there not? And we’ve been so indoctrined into this way of thinking that we struggle to look at other options as being the “right” way to go about our lives or manifesting our dreams.

As Angie fretted over the idea that, perhaps, this man had no intentions of building a life with her in the future, I had to stop her to tell her my story.

“Angie, I had a house. I had a life. I had an established reputation. I had everything you’re supposed to want. And I left it all. It changed in an instant. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is ever set in stone. Things can always shift and change—all we have to do is make the choice to change.” So, moral of the story: who says he’s already decided that he won’t have you in his life? People change, have epiphanies, make the moves to give their lives a complete reboot each and every day. Nothing is permanent.

And it’s true! Nothing is permanent. Not even owning a house. You can move. You can sell all of your belongings, buy a motorhome, and travel around the country until you figure out where to settle next. You can keep your home and rent it out. There’s no rule that tells us that step one has to lead to step two. Or that step two is actually step two. The wisdom in this message is that there are no steps. There is no such thing as universal law regarding how you’re supposed to live your life and manifest your dreams. The only “law” I see is to love. That’s it. Live with compassion and forgiveness. Allow yourself the space to grow and change. Be gentle with yourself and treat others as you would want to be treated. And the rest will flow from there.

I think about my friends who have gone through divorce and ended up feeling bitter or disenfranchised about it. The pain I see from that situation is not because of the divorce, itself; it’s pain that is caused by feeling like they failed at something. Or that the other person rejected them. And so instead of going within to ask “why do I feel like a failure? Am I a failure? If I feel rejected, does this mean that I’m not good enough to have a relationship?” and finally, the ultimate question: “Can I ever do this again if I know what the pain of divorcing is like?” they lament on what happened to them.The answers are that “No! You are NOT a failure. You ARE worthy of love. You CAN have a relationship with someone who loves you. This is NOT about YOU. This is simply a pathway to better things, but it hurts right now. Everything will, eventually, be okay.”

Can you believe that? Can you buy into the fact that divorce is not a personal thing? Can you allow yourself to imagine that your partner “leaving you” is not about them leaving you? Can you imagine that divorce, albeit painful and challenging, can be a good thing? Can you believe that, after such debilitating pain, miracles are actually in store for you if you let yourself believe in love again?

Divorce is about making a choice: to be happy or not to be happy. That’s it. It’s very simple. Our egos are very susceptible to processing that pain as rejection or abandonment because society tricks us into believing in permanence. And to be impermanent about a relationship is to fail. Our egos allow us to fear that it’s something we did. Our egos allow us the paradoxical pleasure of being victims of circumstance in utterances like “he left me for another woman” or “my wife left me high and dry.” When we position ourselves as victims of circumstance, we actually give our power away. We tell the world that we’re not in charge of how we feel and how we choose to handle the world around us. We tell the world that it’s not our fault that we feel sad, and so then we also allow the choice to be happy again become someone else’s decision (but it’s OURS!). We tell the world that someone else has the power to make us feel hurt and pain. This is not the way we are intended to live, people! We are always in charge of how we feel and no one should have the power to make us feel as though we are not worthy of being loved, accepted or appreciated. You are never the victim of circumstance; you are the champion of what you will do next. You are the hero of your own life by embodying the meaningfulness of your own self worth. The only thing that is permanent is the love within you. The capacity that you have to love yourself in each moment, no matter the circumstance or challenges that life provides you. Pain is a gift! It teaches us where we had a weakness in our patterns of thinking. It teaches us that our egos are not the truest parts of ourselves. Pain allows us the opportunity to grow and to become stronger.

Pain, my friends, is a great teacher.

Words cannot describe the pain that I felt when I found myself in love with someone who couldn’t love me back. But this pain and this love taught me more about myself than anything has ever taught me before. Learning to appreciate this love for its mere existence was harder than ROTC field training, going to grad school and working full time, and pulling myself out of an abusive relationship--harder than all of these things combined, that is to say. I do not wish this journey of self-actualization through love and loss on anyone, but the pain of it all has brought me to depths of self love that I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams. This love, this loss, this pain was an incredible, divine gift. But I had to choose to see it that way.

Pain, no matter how horrible it is in the moment or how overwhelmed you feel by it, is impermanent. Pain is temporary. Pain is not the natural state of our multidimensional selfhood. Pain is a gift that allows us to see the meaningfulness of things like joy, elation or blissful states of happiness. Pain allows us to appreciate goodness. Pain allows us to understand how deeply we care for our loved ones. Pain permits us to feel empathy for others whom we may have hurt in our past, and maybe even have the strength to say "I'm sorry." Pain is never the enemy; our negative thought patterns or social programming, however, are.

I think back to my own divorce, as an example, and it truly came down to one thing: we were two, different people who realized we needed different things out of a relationship. I would never have asked him to change who he was for me. He would have never asked me to compromise who I was and what I wanted out of life for him, either. It wasn’t personal—it was just a choice we had face and make, together. I’m very fortunate to say that we still respect one another and harbor no animosity towards our separation. I think it’s because we just knew that things weren’t going as well as they should. I wasn’t always the best partner! I know there are things that I really took for granted about him. And him, me, likewise. But it wasn’t personal—it was our own egos playing into the idea that we had to make things work no matter how hard it felt or what the cost might be to the true, inner most parts of our souls.

I recently said to my friend, Joanna, that the universe will continue to put the same thing in front of you, over and over again, until you learn that lesson and release yourself from it. I believe that Justin and I were making a really healthy choice to release ourselves from a potential cycle of things coming to a head and then us trying to work them out, and then coming to a place of exhaustion and discontent over and over again. What people don’t know is that we had come to the place of discontent in our relationship where those words of separation were said or the subject of divorce was danced around. A year prior to us divorcing, he even said to me “I want a divorce. I’m not happy. How can you be happy when things aren’t good?” He expressed that he felt as though I had been “harping on him” and perhaps I was. I do not excuse myself from the responsibility of being too hard on him. And likewise, I don’t excuse him for having expectations of me, as a wife, that I didn’t see myself committing to. I cannot excuse myself from the responsibility of the part I played in our relationship. But the point is this: ask anyone who has gotten divorced, even those who say “my wife left me,” and I guarantee they’ll say that, underneath it all, they weren’t happy either. Ask anyone who claims to be a victim of circumstance, and I bet they felt it coming. Or perhaps they, too, felt as though their needs weren’t being met, and so the divorce is actually one of those “blessings in disguise.” I bet you any money that those who tell the truth will accept that they didn’t feel fulfilled in the relationship as well, no matter how hard they swear, in the beginning, that this came out of nowhere. If you’re willing to be honest with yourself and take responsibility for your actions or inaction, this is the first step to releasing yourself from the illusion of permanence. It is the first step towards the realization that we truly are in charge of our own destinies, and everything happens for you not to you.

The only thing that is constant in this world is change. Things are always changing, shifting, morphing. What a beautiful gift we’ve been given of this thing called change! The destruction of one paradigm or facade is the opportunity for something more beautiful, more meaningful, more authentic, to sprout from its ashes. The phoenix rising from the flames of sudden and terrifying death.

In the tarot deck, we have the Death card. People who don’t read tarot always fear “will a tarot reading tell me when I die?” And they cringe when they get the Death card. But I say, “There is nothing to fear! The Death card is a great card to receive!” (And for god sakes, NO TAROT READING WILL EVER TELL YOU WHEN YOU’LL DIE.) Why is the Death card a good thing? Because it heralds a death of the old. The ending of a cycle in your life. Maybe you don’t want to let go of that part of your life, and your ego clings to it because it’s comfortable. You know it. You understand it. But you aren’t growing from it anymore. And so the universe will position you in a place where you have no choice but to release yourself from the old and step into the new. This happens when we get fired or laid-off. It happens when your husband says “I want a divorce.” It happens when you find yourself with a chronic illness and now have to change the way you live your life. It happens, even, when someone you love leaves this world. It is an invitation from the divine to see, truly and finally, the potential of who you might become despite that love or comfort you came to rely on so heavily. Please don’t misunderstand this explanation as a happy justification for losing our loved ones. It’s not! Yet, for my personal beliefs (and this is just in my personal outlook/opinion), I have to believe that even in death, our loved ones have made a choice before this incarnation to leave us so that we can appreciate that love and learn from it. Death sucks, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not personal. Right? It just happens. It happens to everyone. And no matter how it happens, we still have to process it and deal with it with love and forgiveness in our hearts. We have to forgive ourselves from the pain we feel when they leave us, and we have to acknowledge that the love we have for that person never dies. It is always there for us to remember, access and hold dearly to our hearts throughout the remainder of our lifetimes. The pain we feel when things end is a shock to our system because it’s the part of our egos that believed in the permanence of things in life. Allow yourself the gift of letting go of ideations of permanence. Allow yourself to feel the weight melt off of your shoulders when you realize you don’t have to harbor the victimhood of circumstance any longer. Just bask in the knowing that you hold the keys to your own happiness, not that bitch who left you standing at the alter.

Nothing ever happens TO you. Everything happens FOR you.

Everything that happens in this life is a gift, a lesson, an opportunity to grown and change. It is the opportunity to shed the skin of our carefully crafted egos so that we may become the most beautiful embodiment of our souls’ purest bliss.

If you don’t believe me, I understand. I hear you. I feel you. I’ve been there, too. But I sit here today to tell you that nothing that I’ve come to learn or know or appreciate has come easily. It has all come at the price of letting go of those expectations of how things are supposed to be and surrendering to how things just are. I couldn’t make the man I loved love me back. I couldn’t make him commit to me. I couldn’t change his mind or force him to see that the love I had for him was real, true and the deepest love I’ve ever felt for another human being. I couldn’t change the trajectory of that situation if I would have tried. We all have our own paths in life, and we all have our own lessons to learn, however painful or joyful.

I choose, in this moment, to rise from the pain, not above it. But through it. In it. Drenched in it. Soaked in it. Truly wrapped in it so that I can be the one who releases myself from it. No one else holds that power: I do.

Why is this message important to share today? I guess it’s because I see so many people whom I love in the midst of their own, personal struggles and I wish to tell you that you’re not alone. I wish to share with you that I believe in you. I believe in us all. I have faith in the ability for love to rise to the top of any pool of misery and confusion. 

Imagine that suffering, that loss of love and times past, as a vast and deep ocean. You’re in it. No life jacket. No buoy to hold onto. No land in sight. You tread water vigorously, trying to keep your head above water. You greedily gulp each breath of air, praying that it won’t be your last. You struggle and fight to survive, but the waves still lap over your head and you curse the loneliness you are forced to face right now. You think: “Why, God?! Why is this happening to me? What did I do to deserve this?!” You beg the heavens for reprieve, for something to hold onto if even for just a fleeting moment. And finally, after a long and arduous struggle, you give up. You say “fuck it.” You’d rather just die than have to suffer through this agony any longer. So you stop treading water. You sink, at first. But then slowly, deliberately, your body begins to rise to the surface. The air within you becomes the love within you. The forgiveness. The peace. The ultimate surrender. And you float, effortlessly. You float with the tide, no direction or horizon to aim towards. You simply float. You begin to laugh to yourself and wonder why the fuck you were struggling so hard to begin with. You see a dove fly overhead, and you imagine yourself as that bird, flying freely over the place where the ocean meets the sky. Your limbs dangle almost weightlessly in the water, waves gently lapping over your fingers and toes. Your feet sink down just a few inches, and suddenly, you realize you’re touching sand. You can stand! You plant your feet firmly in the ocean floor and turn around to realize you’ve just floated ashore to a place that you didn’t even realize was there. It’s a tropical island, and what you don’t know yet is that it represents everything you dreamed about while you were planning on giving up. It’s the place where God asked to take you at first, but instead of letting the current guide you, you struggled. Now you know. Now you know there is a higher power, a divine life force that always has your best interest in mind.

Get out of the water. Go walk upon that shore. Go find what is meant for you. But first, you have to let go of everything you thought to be true and permanent. You have to embrace the idea that you don't have to know all of the answers right now. All you need to do is love yourself enough to ask the question: what is it that I seek? And allow the universe to finally, beautifully, effortlessly, bring it to you. 

I hope that this message helps at least one person out there who is struggling with knowing where life is taking you next. For me, I can tell you that I'm full of anxieties and apprehension about the unknown, but I can't lose myself in them. I have to surrender, understand that everything has divine timing, and let go. In the meantime, I hold onto the faith that I have within myself to rise--to always rise--to meet my future with open arms. An open mind. And, most of all, with an open heart.