Listen to Your Pain
"I once believed I could rely on my intellect to out‑think pain: an impressive résumé, a comprehensive life plan, a creative library of writing and art, anything to show I was intellectually strong, while avoiding repressed feelings. Yet, J. Mike Fields warns, “If you don’t honor and own your pain, you will unconsciously seek everyone and everything outside of you to fix it, thus confirming your fate of rejection, unworthiness, and abandonment.” Carl Jung validates the same notion in six syllables: “What you resist, persists.” When I finally listened, I discovered what physician Gabor Maté keeps telling us: the body’s signals never stop keeping score, however loudly the mind tries to ignore and bury them.
Photo from Canva Stock Photos, 2023
Raised in a culture that prizes tidy logic and treats feelings like unruly children, I forged on, mind blazing and body ignored, until the locked threshold of grief and rage tore open a room I deemed too painful, and unimportant. Storyteller Michael Meade reminds us, “The wound and the gifts live in the same place”; the treasures I sought were waiting behind doors barred by rationality. As I was dismissing myself, my body was keeping score.
As the inner riot grew, its echo sounded in the world around me. My experiences in Nature became my location for emotional release. Poet‑ecologist Gary Snyder writes, “Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.” Yet we have mined, fenced, striped and packaged that home as if it were a warehouse of distant objects, unfeeling and dead. Susan Griffin names the intimacy with Nature we avoid: “As I go into her, she pierces my heart. As I penetrate further, she unveils me. When I have reached her center, I am weeping openly. I have known her all my life, yet she reveals stories to me, and these stories are revelations and I am transformed.” Earth is less landscape than mirror, reflecting everything we refuse to claim. My consciousness of Nature parallels my consciousness within my own body.
Starhawk widens the frame: “The earth is a living, conscious being… air, fire, water, and earth are sacred.” When we sense that living consciousness beneath our feet it becomes harder to bulldoze forests or numb our own roots with scrolling, shopping, or the next adrenaline rush.
So I began a different practice, small and awkward at first: pausing before each decision to ask what my shoulders, my belly, and my pulse had to say. I walked alone, in silence, letting wind feed my thoughts and cedar sap cling to my palms. In moss‑soft clearings I heard John O’Donohue’s promise: “Once you start to awaken, no one can ever claim you again for the old patterns.” Awakening, it turns out, is less epiphany than ongoing conversation, breath trading secrets with branch, heartbeat answering river‑stone.
Pain, once ignored, does not vanish; it transforms. The energy that once fueled avoidance now feeds curiosity and trust. Intellect is still a bright star, but I have learned to slip through the darkness, into the moonlit garden of the body, where wind brushes skin and the earth hums beneath it all. Go under what is under the pain.
So here is an invitation. At dusk, create a small circle of light: I use a strand of white fairy lights, but even a single candle will do. Sit beside it as you would with an old dog. Ask your pain to arrive as your best friend and tell its story. Listen past the first crackle of resistance. The light will not fix you, yet its steady glow will reveal what has been waiting to be loved: within you, around you, and all the way down to the living earth that holds us both."
written by Brenda Littleton
Tin Flea Publication copyright 2025
Photo from Canva Stock Photos, 2023