Think of a time when you were really suffering. You felt like nothing worked. You felt alone and no one could help you. In times of suffering we often ask ourselves questions like: “Why is this happening to me? What’s wrong with me? Will this ever end?”
In the season of Discover, we are finding out how we make our bodies the way they are. Often this starts with the observation that something is really painful. We feel helpless and can’t imagine anyone or anything that could improve our situation. Our focus is on being helpless and at the mercy of external factors that have made us a victim. Our energy is directed inward, moving downward and tends to be bound in areas of pain or tension. Our bodies are tense and our respiration is shallow. We feel despair and no one can help us. This is “Suffering” and it is the first of the “12 Stages of Healing” and one of the three stages that we experience as we move through the season of Discover.
As we realize that there is help available we move to the completion of Stage 1--Suffering. Our energy starts to move, breath begins to fill parts of our bodies that were bound up with tension and we begin to feel things we could not feel before. As our energy starts moving upwards we begin to feel alive. We begin looking for the person, doctor, pill or potion, exercise program or diet that will solve all our problems. We find ourselves focusing on the thing, the event, or the person who caused all our problems. We become polarized towards the things like best solutions, the worst conditions, the right medication, the wrong diagnosis. Here we find ourselves in Stage 2—Polarity.
In Stage 2—Polarity, our energy is moving outwards. Our focus is on finding the cause of our problems, the person to blame and the best help. We ask questions like: “What is the cause of this? Who/What did this to me? Who can fix this?” We may feel anger towards what we see as the cause of our problems and we may feel happy when we find the person or thing that is going to solve all our problems. Inevitably the magic solution never works and we either return to “Suffering” or move on to Stage 3—Stuck in a Perspective.
Stage 3 is both frustrating and funny at the same time. It is the point where our attention turns from blaming all the external factors for our situation to the realization that maybe we had something to do with it. It is the point where the guy who has been divorced five times says, “It wasn’t my five exes that had the problem. It was me!” We are frustrated but we find the situation comical. Our focus has turned inward and we find a place where energy is stuck. At this point we don’t know what to do about it and we are just going to be stuck. We ask ourselves, “Why do I keep doing this? Why can’t I solve this now?”
The Season of Discover is complete when we have truly connected with Stages 1, 2 and 3. Level 1 of NSA care is complete meaning that we can connect to tension in our bodies and release it. Our breath moves in a wave from the tailbone to the occiput. We are moving into Level 2A of NSA care and are stretching, which creates more range of motion physically and more range of emotion.
What this means is that we now know how we make our bodies the way they are. We know it because that is what it takes to make us experience life the way we do. Because we know what we do and how we do it, we are ready to make sustainable changes to our bodies and our lives. We are ready to move into the second season, “The Season of Transform”.
