Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about healing old pain. When it comes to healing old patterns and emotional pain, we can sometimes associate emotional overload with cathartic release and cathartic release with emotional healing. As if we're purging all of this pain from our body if we feel it full on. But healing old pain is often much more tricky and nuanced than that while it's true that opening the flood gates and feeling a rush of emotion can sometimes be a big first step in reconnecting to repressed emotion, especially when it's done in a safe container.

It's seldom, if ever, the whole story of healing. And it's often too much sensation for the nervous system to hold. Leaving us with an overload of energy that temporarily feels good and exciting, but it's far from integrated into who we are. We have to remember that most repressed pain and trauma was caused because at the time of experiencing the pain we didn't have the inner and outer resources to meet, process, integrate the difficult experience. And so we did the best we could with the resources at hand.

And, and often when we're children that looks like disassociating, denying, disconnecting from our bodies, suppressing the experience, fawning over our oppressor, etcetera. This of course has long-term consequences. Keeping the emotional experience lodged in our brains and bodies, and also keeping us playing out old protective patterns. So if were to help release this stuck energy and move toward more integration, it often requires feeling the things that we never fully felt. But this needs to be done by meeting that pain from the part of us that is older, more mature and better resourced to hold and process it.

This is very different than going into some cathartic release. Foundational to any healing is going to be establishing a sense of safety. Specifically, the knowing that you can step out of the pain before going into it. Of course, this kind of healing and trauma healing is often best done with a trained therapist. And if you're looking for a great book that goes more into this, I do recommend The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk.

But the key takeaway I'd like you to have is this feeling pain for the sake of feeling pain is not healing. We need to meet our pain from the place within us that is attuned, patient and kind, otherwise we're just reliving trauma. So thank you for your practice. I'll talk to you in the meditation and take care.