Bends of Light

How is it that we feel both love and pain? Limiting the love you give ultimately leads to some kind of pain. Love is too big for that. 

The Paradox of Love and Pain

A decade ago, contactee Alex Collier famously quoted his Andromedan guide, saying, “The love that you withhold is the pain that you carry.” While some attribute this aphorism to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the truth of the thought encapsulated in these words remains, despite the source, a testament to the human adventure. It illustrates in a nutshell the paradox of how love and pain can, and often do, coexist. This is the basis for many arguments against the primacy of love at all; however, understanding it reveals the simple elegance of its validity.

Ways We Experience Pain

In a universe of love, how can pain be? Why does love so often lead to hurt? If love is everything, why am I sad? From thoughts such as this are nightmares of separation born, and doubts in the divine. However, think on this: It is in hoarding love, withholding it, keeping it from its natural movement and flow that we feel pain.

(NOTE: I’m purposefully limiting this discussion to levels of pain that we all feel from time to time and that can cripple our forward movement in growth. I don’t include in this specifically the extremes of abuse which are being revealed more often these days, though holographically there is a thread to follow there. This is a launching point for further exploration, as you wish to go.)

Here are some situations, very general in nature, which might sound familiar to you. See if you can apply any of these to current sources of feeling a lack of love in some area of your life. They’re all the kinds of situations people normally run into in the course of living with other people on this planet:

Example 1: Someone irritates you. You pull back from a family member or friend. You devise convoluted arguments in your mind justifying your separation from loving this person. Even if you do love this person in a general sort of way, are you demonstrating that love by creating a boundary? Does your irritation resolve itself, or does it merely shift into a space of loss or sorrow at a lost opportunity to connect, and experience something new that love would gladly show you?

Example 2: Someone hurts you. In anger and disbelief (in love), you slam up walls girded with spikes and poison. Even if this person went out of their way to cause you pain, is your pain diminished by purposefully fencing yourself into your safe space? Does retribution handle the healing, or does it numb the point of pain? Numbness = forgetting = limiting your awareness.

Example 3: You hurt someone. Whether it was from rage, ignorance, or stillborn affection, some word or action (intention) has telegraphed from you to another a shard of hurt. The other person feels it. But when you really settle yourself within your thoughts, in bald honesty, you feel the pain, too. Will the bleeding stop?

These are just a few of the countless permutations of the love/pain paradox. Anger. Discord. The absent partner, father, child. The deceitful associate, the cheating spouse. The leader caught in a lie, the unfinished business and unaccepted opportunity. The fallen hero. The fights. And on and on and on. Our ability to experience love-turned-painful is limitless… yet it doesn’t need to be infinite. There is a way out…

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© 2019 Maryann Rada, sharing permitted with link to original article