The Meaning of Pain
Hello! My name is Catherine and I am a recovering codependent.
Codependency is an acquired mental health disorder, based on social conditioning and upbringing.
At its core, codependency means that I don’t didn’t love myself. I was taught not to. Instead I was taught that to give of myself to others made me a good person, and keeping myself to myself made me a bad person.
I was taught that self-love is shameful; by people who themselves had been shamed not to love themselves.
I’ve had enough. By not loving myself I have treated myself and others badly. No more.
I now practice self-love.
This blog post is interactive: I ask that you read while listening to the music as prompted. Please finish listening to each track before playing the next track.
I ask that you only click the text links after you have finished reading through the post, because the pace of the writing matches the pace of the music and clicking the text links will interrupt your experience.
I invite you to not just read this post, but to experience both the words and the music.
The Meaning of Pain
I’ve created a playlist on Spotify called I love you Catherine. It’s a self-love mix-tape. Some of the pieces of music are deeply moving, others are a bit of fun and there are a couple that are emotionally challenging for me to listen to.
I ask you to now press play and listen to this piece of music while you are reading.
Take your time, there’s no rush.
Synesthesia
My enjoyment of music isn’t limited to my sense of hearing. The technical term for how I experience music is synesthesia. I feel the music in my body, in my muscles, on my skin. I truly believe I can feel the mitochondria; the battery within each of my cells, respond to music.
I can physically sense music in the air and see it in the air as shapes and colours. Sometimes I want music so loud that it challenges my monkey self (my instinctual self) to stand her ground and flipping dance it out instead of running away from the overwhelm; other days I want music to be so soft and subtle that I have to reach out my hands and explore the air around me until I find the coloured ribbons of the sound waves to experience the music fully.
I like to draw music into myself. It’s like the music is a conduit for energy from the universe and I can pull that energy into myself. In this way I can also release energies from myself; my lymphatic system especially appreciates a good cleanse/dance. I can sense the emotional shit coming up from somewhere deep inside of myself, passing along my limbs and being flicked, wafted or flung from my hands and feet.
I love dancing.
I miss dancing, barefoot and sober and carefree, under the African sun.
I frequently get full-body goosebumps when I dance because I can feel the music moving in me and through me. About 50% of people report a similar experience; it’s called frisson, a relative of euphoria.
I see colours when I listen to music. I have flavours occur in my mouth. I can smell music. Yes, you can laugh; sometimes I can smell music! I have a different sensual experience each time I listen to a piece of music. Flamingo by Infected Mushroom sometimes makes me smell and taste pink Fizzers, a type of fizzy candy from my childhood. Sometimes that track is barbecue sauce and sprung wood floors. But always, it’s a good time. (I really, really enjoy Infected Mushroom. I may write a post about my love affair with Infected Mushroom because they’ve been with me, deeply affecting and influencing me synesthetically since my teens.)
I don’t always have an intense experience, and I don’t always have a smell or a taste or a physical sensation. It’s a fickle gift, is synesthesia.
The way that I feel the music in my body changes too. Sometimes music, any music, feels like a fluid that moves freely through me, sloshing and gushing and bubbling. Other times I feel like it is a swarm of bees, or a bucketload of rubber bouncy balls knocking about inside me.
My synesthesia isn’t limited to music. Numbers have colours. And emotions… Well!
Emotions are a very interesting experience for me.
Please finish listening to Flower Duet before pressing play on Mad Woman below:
A Gift Called Fibromyalgia
I feel my emotions in my body as physical experiences. When I am excited and happy, my body feels light and sparkly. When I am sad, I feel slow and soft and heavy. When I am angry I feel a raging current trapped inside my body and I yearn to release it by clenching my fists and bellowing until I’m breathless.
I had this following experience yesterday, Friday. I was having a marvellous day; editing my colouring pages on Photopea and uploading them here on my website, bopping to music and feeling good after a go at the gym and a shower.
Slowly but insistently my being; my spirit, started to lean on me as if to say, brace yourself, something’s coming.
My heart started beating faster, I became breathless and a tightness formed at the back of my throat. Adrenaline and cortisol began pumping into my muscles, making them tense and achy and my body felt overwhelmingly heavy. I felt dizzy, constricted, suffocated, confused.
In the recent past I’d have recognised this attack of fibromyalgia and numbed the pain with medical cannabis. But I’m in therapy now and I don’t use antidepressants or cannabis anymore. I have the guidance of a lioness who’s teaching me to sit with my feelings and then let them go. This is all much, much nicer than not feeling those feelings and packing them away into my already-overflowing cupboard of uncomfortable emotions.
So, because it was nearing time for my siesta anyway, I put myself to bed to feel my feelings. What I’ve discovered is that I can climb Enlightenment Hill even when I am at home. I do it by allowing my whole self to experience my emotions, and by embracing all the synesthetic experiences that come with them.
I released my desire to control the experience and just let the emotions and the physical sensations come as they may. My body began to burn with betrayal. I felt as though my skin had charred away leaving every nerve fibre unprotected.
I curled up on my side and cried silently.
My tears felt caustic on my cheeks. My head pounded and my body pulsed to the rhythm of my heartbeat. This one’s a doozy, I kept thinking of the coming realisation, this one’s a doozy.
POUND POUND POUND
The realisation arrived slowly, almost politely, as if acknowledging that because it’s a doozy I would need it to approach me with care. I realised that someone who is deeply, intrinsically linked to my soul had pulled a dirty trick on me; they had manipulated, influenced and controlled others to manipulate, influence and control me. Instead of using their words to communicate what they wanted from me; they used their most precious and powerful gift; their Presence, to control. They had dehumanised themself by behaving in controlling, dehumanising ways. They had dehumanised others. They’d dehumanised me.
They’d behaved like a Butcher Boy.
I felt that realisation with all the tortured horror of a burn victim. I felt irrevocably, unwillingly transformed and affected.
I truly understood the meaning of the word disillusionment.
I didn’t sleep. I fell into a fugue, a kind of waking coma or shocked daze. When I started to rouse from this state I repeated, All is as it is meant to be, All is as it is meant to be, All is as it is meant to be.
I acknowledged my true self’s true feeling that I’m so tired of being controlled.
When Mad Woman finishes, please press play on High and Dry:
Learning to Honour Myself
When I emerged from my bed I made myself a cuppa and sat myself with gentleness and kindness on my couch.
I found myself wanting an apology, and wanting for amends to be made. I wanted the manipulator to own their monsters. I wanted them to own how they had dehumanised us all with their actions. I felt pissed off and hurt. I measured and judged and wanted.
It was this wanting feeling that pissed me off the most. The universe, God, has provided me with everything I need within me - wanting from others is a sign that I am not being true to myself and not honouring myself or the universe.
So I ran myself through my self-made Honour Code.
This is an action plan that I have recently created for myself to practice modifying my behaviour. It helps me to practice owning myself, managing myself and honouring myself. Running through my Honour Code allows me to honour others too by keeping myself, including my monsters, to myself instead of flinging parts of myself like my blame monster or my hurt monster, at others. I use it when I find myself controlling, measuring or wanting instead of lovingly and gratefully surrendering myself to the Divine Plan and the understanding that All is as it is meant to be.
It goes like this:
Catherine’s Code of Honour
Acknowledge - I acknowledge that I have been manipulated. I acknowledge that All is as it is meant to be and this is part of the Divine Plan.
Accept - I accept that the manipulator had their reasons; these reasons are none of my business and not my responsibility.
Apologise - I apologise for not realising the manipulation sooner and addressing it. I apologise for unwittingly allowing the manipulation to have such a destructive effect on my marriage, my body and my mind.
Forgive - I release us all from my anger and upset feelings of blame and shame.
Thank - I am grateful for this intriguing, enlightening, painful experience.
Love - I love us all, I love this experience, I love All that is, was and will be. I love how much I am learning from having this experience. I love myself for not losing my shit at this realisation and throwing tantrums. I love my grace.
Release - I release my desire to control this situation. I release my desire to control you. I release my desire for an apology. I release my desire for amends to be made. I release you from my wanting something from you.
Please read that list again. It is valuable.
The Art of Living
I’m busy watching a documentary about a mathematician philosopher. Somewhere near the middle of the film he recounts the story of how he was out swimming nude one day, in the ocean around Hawaii, when he swam into a swarm of man-o-war jellyfish which have one of the world’s most painful stings. He describes how he managed to get himself to shore after pulling the creatures off his body, and how he then endured the agony of the stings for hours, all alone in an untouched wilderness with no human aid anywhere nearby.
He described how he tapped into a beautiful pool of souls; a collective gathering of all the people who’ve endured torture. He was so moved by the retelling of this experience that he began to weep, and doesn’t explain further. I’m not quoting him word-for-word here; I’m telling you my recollection of his story.
At the point that he starts to weep, I felt sorrow that he couldn’t explain what he had experienced. So I’ve taken it upon myself to explain here my own experience of this same Noosphere. I call it The Pain Pool.
The Noosphere is related to Emergence Theory, a theory which will continue to pop up in my blog posts in snippets like this until I understand it well enough to write an entire post dedicated to the theory.
Please finish High and Dry and start playing Cum Dederit below:
Remember - take your time, there’s no rush.
Cum Dederit - When he Gives
This morning I overslept and when I woke up I allowed myself to wallow in my depression for two whole hours. Finally I got out of bed and chose a colourful dress to cheer myself up in. I put the kettle on and decided I’d love myself with some music. I switched on Jibble, my portable speaker, and pressed shuffle on my I love you Catherine playlist.
Cum Dederit, the piece of music that you’re listening to now, started to play.
Oh God, please, not right now, I begged, because this piece of music often connects me to The Pain Pool and it’s a really intense experience for me.
Right now, came the response.
So I started to dance.
I reached out into the Pain Pool and found all of the others, ever, who have felt this same pain; the spiritual betrayal of being controlled, influenced, manipulated, coerced, tricked and bullied.
My eyes swelled and became hot in their sockets, my spine writhed within me, my hands and feet tried to escape the bonds of my torso and I swung my hair slowly about me while raising my face to the heavens in supplication. I could smell rotting seaweed. I heard the angry hiss of flies on corpses. I could taste musty pine needles and earthworms. My skin prickled with the legs of a thousand tiny beetles scurrying. I sensed the miasma of a battlefield nearby.
We’re with you, said every person who knows or has known or will know this pain, Pain is beautiful. Pain is meaningful. Embrace the feeling and let it go.
My gratitude for my pain emerged then. It welled up from somewhere deep inside of myself. This pain is a cleansing pain; a renewing pain, I realised.
Pain is a gift, not a burden.
I drew into my body and my mind the gratitude of the universe for allowing myself to experience the pain, to understand it and to share my understanding with you here. I felt the gratitude of All that I am playing my part in the Divine Plan by having the courage and grace to tell my story in a way that honours all of the players on the stage. I felt the gratitude of all the people who are being, who have already been, and who will be touched, moved and inspired by me telling my story.
I understood that my pain is meaningful, my pain is beautiful, my pain is not something to run from, or to numb, or to pack away in my despair cupboard. My pain is a beautiful gift from All and with it I am learning how to give my own gifts; my beauty, my grace, my love and my forgiveness, back to the All.
I understood that holding myself and others accountable for our actions in a loving, forgiving and accepting way is a humanitarian act, and a spiritually honouring one.
I understood that pain is a beneficial and necessary part of the human experience.
I understood that shared pain, just like shared joy; connects us. It is a transcendental privilege that is available to us all. Emotional pain is not something to hide from, but to be expressed through play, curiosity and creativity. It is not something to be resisted but rather embraced through trusting, loving human connections. Pain is a healer; a great enlightener that shows us how precious joy and pleasure and comfort is.
Pain shows us how precious our experience is.
I wrapped my arms around my body and swayed and sighed and allowed old parts of myself to die so that new parts could be born. I allowed the singer’s voice to call out parts of myself that I’d hidden away. I allowed those parts to be called into the light of my love and my grace. I washed my soul with forgiveness and gratitude and drank down the bountiful beauty of existence, sating my thirsts, my wantings; fulfilling my own emotional needs without needing apologies or amends.
I allowed my pain to fill in the cracks in my soul and make me whole again.
I held myself within The Pain Pool and I held The Pain Pool within myself, being comforted by and offering my comfort to others who have been controlled, coerced, influenced, bullied and manipulated. I told us all;
We’re with you.
Pain is beautiful. Pain is meaningful. Embrace the feeling and let it go.
When you are ready, I invite you to cleanse your palette with this song by Beautiful Chorus.
Take your time. There’s no rush.
