Your Pain is Your Superpower

The importance of feeling, imagination and intuition in creating a vision for the world we want to live in.

Each one of us is needed on this planet, with our lights turned on and our hearts in tune, our pain in the palm of our hands like a crystal ball, feeling it all.

I spent most of the first part of my life running from my feelings, my pain. I don’t think I realized I was. At least, it wasn’t always a conscious decision.

Sometimes it was—I would literally run, for miles and miles, imagining I was running from that thing that really hurt, which never stayed in one place.

Like a dark shadow, it followed me through my neighborhood as I picked up my running pace, a shadow cast by events that had occurred throughout my life, never far behind, with new events accumulating just on the heels of my stride.

But that pain had information I needed, like the things about myself to look at, to feel and heal. The pain was the threshold, the doorway, to a deeper understanding of decisions I was making, thus my life.

The pain was the tunnel I needed to crawl through to find the light at the end, which was me.

That pain was not my enemy, it was my ally.

That pain of past injustice became the sacred rage that fuels my passion for the work I do.

That pain held the secret to my superpower.

I know I am a few years behind, but my son and I are just finishing season four of Stranger Things, and the relationship between 001 and 0011, Vecna and El, has opened up a new understanding of what this looks like for me. They are two sides of the same coin, both carrying profound pain.

But they do very different things with this pain.

Vecna reminds me of the ignored shadow, the distorted power that comes from trauma left unhealed, from unattended pain that calcifies into control.

Here's the uncomfortable soul truth: You can’t run from your pain, your shadow. It lives in your memories, in your mind, and it will grow, collecting strength from consuming all unaware life, tainting your memories, just as Vecna does. You can only transmute it.

What’s wild is that you can't face Vecna (the demon) until you become the all-powerful and awakened child that is Eleven. But you can't become Eleven until you've felt and embraced your Vecna, your darkness, your pain. Otherwise, it becomes a shadow that silently follows you everywhere, leaking out of the cracks of your psyche sideways.

I offer you an even wilder paradox: Vecna’s darkness resurrects Eleven. In exploiting her wounds and her pain, Venca exposed it. You can’t heal what you can’t see. Those wounds hide in the deepest parts of our psyche until a villain in our story drags them into the light. It forces that part of Eleven that she had been avoiding, where she doubted her strength, felt unworthy, and hid from her bigness, letting the bullies at school tear her down.

The same wound that Vecna uses to enter the mind is the same wound, with awareness of our true selves, that saves his victims. We see Maxine do it the first time Vecna tries to siphon her soul, and she screams: YOU’RE NOT REAL.

Do not let them tell you who you are. Let them ignite the fire within you that illuminates who you know yourself to be deep down within. These polarities between the villain and the hero, the light and the dark, Hawkins and The Upside Down, illustrate what makes the polarity of this Earth school so powerful and soul-expanding. In this way, painful experiences happen for us, not to us.

In these ways, the villains in my life are my heroes. And I know some villains in my life are probably reading this now. Don’t let me tell you who you are. In a parallel universe, I am aware that I am the villain in their lives. You see, we are all both the protagonist and antagonist in our respective worlds. This is how we move forward, like a yin-yang ball of opposites pushing each other and fumbling toward our ecstasy.

When walking through the darkest times in our lives, maybe we can stop and ask ourselves: Is there a way this is all going to work out for me in the end? In what way am I expanding through this horror?

And at times, it will feel like it is swallowing you whole.

Both Vecna and Eleven get their power from their pain, but Vecna’s is distorted with the lie that you are alone in that pain, that nobody loves you, that it’s your fault, and that you are separated from and undeserving of Love.

To my villains: you are loved, you are not separated from the Source of Love, you are deserving of all the love.

Gah, and can we talk about the whole concept of how music and beautiful memories with those we love can pull us out of the shadow’s grip? (Thank you, Kate Bush).

Eleven regains her power to overcome the darkness by reaching into her painful memories, the injustices that have accumulated in her life, and gathering all of her sacred rage into the power of the fiercest love, thereby overcoming.

Love isn’t just Care Bear tummy beams and rainbows — it can also look like Eleven’s rage and be destructive, destroying the thing that is eating Love alive.

---

It has been nearly six years since I have touched anything that has altered the way I feel. I have been wide awake and committed to feeling it all.

Not drinking has been easy for me. That is not everyone’s experience, I know. But feeling everything has been anything but easy.

I am so glad I can feel.

Many of the ways I navigate the world are based on a pull or instinct. Something pulls me toward this trip, or that person, or away from that job or toward another role, even if it makes no rational sense. Recently, it was between planning a trip to Brazil, Argentina, Chile or Peru. I am pulled to Peru, and I couldn’t tell you why.

A feeling.

I rarely understand this deep pulling, but what ends up happening is I do something, and then years later, it will make perfect sense why I needed to do that thing years ago for the other thing to happen today.

I know I am not unique in that way, but I share this because it is the part of my story about when I quit drinking and why, and the story I shared several times over the weekend to women coming off meth, heroin, crack and booze. Women who thought their lives were over. They were broken, bruised and battered by their own attempts to treat their trauma. I needed to be in recovery six years ago so — among many things — I could tell them: Your light is needed in this world. People love you. People need you. I need you.

One woman said she thought the world was ending, and after decades of heroin use, she wanted to be awake for it. I offered her another thought. What if things of this world that do not serve humanity’s highest good are falling away, and the world needs you to show up for yourself and others while we are squeezed through this dark birth canal into a new way?

When we numb out — whether that’s alcohol, streaming shows, TikTok for hours, overeating, pills, entertaining partners who do not honor us, or, for me as of late, it is playing small, shrinking to be palatable for others — we can’t feel our feelings.

When I couldn’t feel, I couldn’t honor my truth, that voice emanating from deep within my heart that whispers: Go this way, not that way.

I am realizing more and more how valuable our feelings are, especially the tough ones. They inform us, they heal us, they help us navigate the concrete jungle, systems and people of confusion and control. They help us navigate our Upside Down, our Vecnas.

Rooted in love, feelings can become our superpower. Rooted in fear, they can become our downfall.

While we are powerless over many things that happen in our lives or things outside of us, we are powerful in ways our human mind cannot imagine. And you get to be awake for that if you choose.

To feel is to listen. To feel is to see. To feel is to heal. To feel is to witness.

If we can’t feel our feelings, we can’t access our inner compass. If we can’t access our inner compass, how can we make solid decisions? Isn’t our life nothing but a series of choices we have made, are making and will make? From what well are we drawing up information to make these important choices?

The hyper-masculine structures in place have minimized emotions, feelings and the imagination for so long. Because there is so much personal power in all three, and that would disrupt their need for “order.” To dream, it imagine, to feel, is to rebel. The rejection of feelings in the name of logic is a disservice to both men and women, because miracles don’t operate in the realm of logic.

And can’t “order” be found in less distrustful and dystopian ways, these systems based on lack and fear? Can it be found in mutual trust, mutual flourishing, honoring personal sovereignty and each other’s humanity, systems based in love?

I imagine a world that is the latter.

Kim Krans states in her writing about archetypes that the imaginal and the imaginary are two distinct concepts. The former is real, the latter is fiction. The imaginal is just beyond the scope of what we can measure, beyond what we have yet experienced, but it can be accessed from our powerful tools of feeling and imagination.

I remember when I was a young student of logic and Western Civilization as a philosophy major at a Catholic college, we were taught that emotions and feelings would mislead us. We dove into the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment Era, where miracles and souls were reduced to organs in the brain — the pineal gland. Some scholars even suggested that feelings were tools of the devil, distractions from our crowning ability to reason.

I have been asking myself a lot lately, why would a Mother-Father God lovingly create His/Her children with bodies and emotions and feelings if they were bad?

If you wish to go the less spiritual route: Why would we evolve into feeling, emotive creatures if it didn’t assist in our evolution as a species?

A woman in the 14th century who felt sadness, depression, or worse, “hysteria” was at risk for being burned at the stake. But what if her body was informing her that she lived in a world that suffocated the very things that made her human? When will we begin to have compassion for the hysterical woman, not as a witch, but as someone whose feelings, thus her world, have been hushed for possibly lifetimes? The same applies to men, who have been taught not to feel because it is perceived as a sign of weakness, silencing their humanity.

That is changing. I see you, men. You are starting to embrace your hearts, and that is some powerful work. It’s hot.

Feelings can lead us astray if fear seeps in when the ego distorts our intuition. Anything governed by fear and not love can distort, so we must be awake and aware to see what is governing us in any given moment.

Like all things, we can go to extremes and can over-identify with our feelings when we say: I am angry, I am sad, I am joy, I am fearful, instead of saying, I feel fear, but it will pass. Or: I feel joy, and I cling to it because it is mine, when it is okay if and when joy passes. She will return.

Our true selves are the steady force that observes these feelings and emotions without attaching ourselves to them nor denying them. Our true selves let them pass like the clouds over a meadow, or the waves over the ocean of our soul as they inform and guide us.

Feelings are our allies when rooted in love, self-compassion, and curiosity. I have spent years committed to sitting with all parts of me, of allowing her to feel, not leaving her when it gets hard, and asking her what she needs from me.

As I was writing this, I remembered this quote by Jim Morrison:

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.”

It resonated, but I would add that to be what you truly are with full awareness of who you are, so that we can act from that awareness with love. We don’t want to become Vecna, who acts out of his wounds.

We are at a tipping point, but the good news is that while the old ways crumble, the new is already here. I see it everywhere. Seeds are planted, sprouting and blooming. Conversations of a new way hum all around. Communities are popping up under shared causes, shared concerns, shared needs, shared feelings. Each person’s personal revolution is evolving into a revolution of love and kindness for all. It makes me smile.

Love is all around. Can you feel it? Hang on to that. Because I need you, all of you, alive and feeling everything.