A Word About Pain

Pain is the way we’re directed toward change.

I want to say something about pain specifically because today, I’m feeling it. An elbow issue that I imagine partially stems from a broken elbow when I was around 5 or 6 flared up again in December, just after my mom died. I rock climb and boulder regularly, but that month and for most of November I didn’t get to the indoor climbing gym as much as normal. So I find the recurrance of this old injury intriguing—what exacerbated it, exactly? Not using my forearm muscles as much as usual?

Strange.

After spending a day of skiing with my kids yesterday, I came home and the pain was worse than it’d been for a few days. Those who suffer from chronic pain know how demoralizing it can be. My heart goes out to you.

And so, while it’s on my mind, I’ve been wanting and planning to do a page that specifically addresses the topic of pain, both as an emotional struggle and as a physical one.

To begin, you are not your pain. 

When you receive it in any way, pain is meant to be a quick readjustment of your energy; e.g. the soul, the higher self, your guides, whoever is attempting to help you either from this side or the other side, is giving it to you to help you realign with your path. 

When you resist the pain rather than changing course, you begin to identify with that pain. You accept it. Your threshold for receiving pain increases, and the signals from your guidance must get louder and louder and more destructive until you listen. This can be any of the following (take note, and this list is not comprehensive because the ways we can feel pain are as plentiful as grains of sand on the beach): heartache, an autoimmune condition, a stomach ache, a cold, grief, divorce, the death of a loved one, joint pain, regret, chronic back pain, a broken bone, a car accident, depression, loss of friends, loss of family, loss of a pet. 

The longer you fight the pain or accept it and simply “live with it,” the harder it becomes to release.

Humans have been programmed for thousands of years with the misbelief that life is suffering and that pain is natural to our existence.

The more programming we have about pain, the more pain we will accept before we change course. 

Your birthright is actually that of master creator, not emotional or physical whipping post of an indifferent or cold universe. 

It’s not too late to change your programming. It’s not too late to listen to yourself delivering you out of pain and into light and love.

You might be thinking, “What does she mean, ‘deliver myself’ or ‘listen to myself’?”

If you’ve read any of my other pages or listened to any number of new age spiritualists, you’ll have heard the concept that everything that’s happening to you in this incarnation has been designed by you, for you. This goes hand in hand with the concept that you’re not a victim of anything, that it was all given to you for you, for the evolution and edification of YOU.

When we shed the mentality of the victim, we reclaim that allotment of power and energy to do something with our lives. 

After my divorce was final and I was living on my own, seeing my kids just 50% of the time (this is the default in Utah), for a while, when they would initially go with their dad again, it was always difficult. Often it led to an hour or so of an emotional purge for me. Meaning, tears. And heartache. 

At some point, there was a moment where they said bye and left, and I got busy with my work again. No tears.

It hit me: I was healing. 

I knew I would see them again, and in a way, they were always with me. And their lives are their own adventure. Some of that adventure they spend with me. Some of it they spend with their dad or other kids at school. 

And then a new thing hit me: healing means being OK with releasing pain.

That was an earth-shattering moment. 

Many times during those moments of sadness about the state of my life, I would ask myself: why did I choose this? Why did I do this to myself? Is this worth it? 

When something happens in a way that allows you to pose the question to the universe, “Why is this happening to me? It’s unfair. What did I do to deserve this?”

Rephrase it to, “Why did I do this to myself? Why did I set myself up for this situation? What am I trying to teach myself?”

If you do that, a massive shift will happen that allows you to progress quicker and with less catastrophic damage to your life. You will ascend toward higher vibrations faster.

Understand that an ascension into higher vibrations isn’t a small thing or something that you won’t notice. The nature of this is exponential. As you shift these things, the effects begin to double, then triple, then quadruple.

The reason for this is because every thought you have creates reality.

But, it isn’t just thoughts that do that. Emotions create reality too. If a thought is a horse-drawn carriage moving out into reality from the electrical signal in your brain, then an emotion is that jet in Top Gun 2 (I forget the name).

This idea isn’t new—various schools of discipline have their own way to explain it and different labels for it, assigning various entities to the action which may or may not be true. Labels only matter in that they can help us grasp the concept within whatever paradigm we understand. Some will say angels or archangels did it, or god did it, or fairies did it. They can all be true. 

The point is: belief. 

And this goes back to pain, which is also belief. 

Years ago a friend of mine told me that he’d been suffering debilitating back pain for several months when we had the chance to connect at a convention. I didn’t know the cause of his back pain, but now that I understand the actual nature of pain, I know that he was giving it to himself (many people will go for the throat if you tell them this, so I try to do it gently). 

Here, I’ll reference a physician from NYU on back pain, John Sarno who, back in the late 90s was featured a few times in the news for his pioneering work in how the mind will create a physical manifestation of pain such as in the back to distract the mind from great emotional distress. He understood this from studying hundreds of X-rays on “healthy” backs and the backs of those under grave physical duress. Both groups had the same kind of visible issues in their backs. The difference was in something else, namely their emotional health. Harvard Medical School has also begun to indicate that back pain stems from something more than the physical realm. 

My friend and I tried vaping weed (legally) to see if that would help his back. He’d been considering surgery because he’d tried everything, but nothing seemed to help. I’m a terrible teacher of anything to do with weed (it was my suggestion, and my vape pen [which hadn’t been used in months and months, that’s how not proficient I am in weed use]). 

Then we parted ways. 

When I ran into him in the morning, he told me that it was the first morning he’d woken up in months where he wasn’t in pain. He attributed the alleviation of his back issue to the weed.

But it was something else.

Living without being in constant pain of some sort means learning how to release pain and suffering. 

My friend whose back pain vanished the morning after he kind of sort of vaped some weed, was given permission to let go of something that was defining him. He sat for a few moments in the presence of another friend who had no constraints on him in terms of who he was or what he brought to the table and who I imagine he sensed cared about his well being.

He was able to fool his mind into believing that he had just given it a dose of something that would work: the weed.

But like I said, I wasn’t a good teacher of how to vape. Did he inhale? Maybe so, but I doubt it. (Yes, that’s a sort of reference to a 90s moment.)

He walked away from that experience seemingly with the belief that weed worked. I walked away from that experience believing that the presence of unconditional love and friendship heals people.

We often need external validation that we’ve taken a drug or done something that will heal our ailments. This is no different from the placebo effect, which I realized years ago is proof of the single most effective power that humans possess: belief. 

What all of this means is that for us to evolve and step into our personal power as the creator of our reality, we must be brave enough to release some of our most core identities and the beliefs that have shaped us. Our back pain. Our grief. Our suffering. The ways we were wronged by others. The hate that we have sheltered in the space of our heart. 

We do this bit by bit, until there is no back pain, there is no hate, there is no grudge left that defines us and perhaps our entire family history. Though it may be scary, you know, to think, “without my rage against this person or that family or this country or that one,” “without my arthritis” or “without my allergy to x,” “without my history as the child of a broken home, or whatever… without that, what am I?”

I know who you are.

You are not your pain. 

I give you permission to release all of that. At some point, you will realize that you always had permission to let go.

—Nicole,

26 February 2025