“Experience is sacred; it is the school of the gods and your life is the classroom” ~The Seer
How to Turn Challenges to Allies
The Seer:
Students of the way of enlightenment, may often embrace the concepts intellectually, only to fail to retain them long enough to apply them — this is particularly true of abstract concepts.
The Native American elders assigned to teaching the young, had a solution for this: to imprint the memory firmly as to where the borders of the tribal territory is, and where they should not stray beyond, they would take them to the boundary and swat them with a reed across the back of the legs. Pain imprints memories. Pain is death’s ally, By gaining the insights of the painful situation, you gain perception and increased perception yields increased power. In this way pain becomes your ally. In this way you steal death’s allies and make them yours; you overcome aging and decay. Furthermore the pain imprints the lessons you have learnt and they become something you can apply for a lifetime.
When I visited Isaak, the San Bushman wisdom-keeper, I asked him how he recommends someone cope with death or loss of a loved one. As I sat in the African dirt with him, he said: “I tell them to ask themselves ‘what can I now do that I couldn’t do before?’ And because the release of the soul from the body releases lifeforce [my word, not his; he called it “mana”] to those left behind, ask ‘what can I now see that I couldn’t see before?'”
Toltec Mystics live frugally — which means they do not waste experience by not learning the lessons; not even death or loss of another, is wasted. Even during “fun” or sports they try and see the principles behind the appearances of frivolity they can learn from.
“Cry your tears and release your pain of loss, for pain suppressed and tears unshed become the scar tissue of the heart that numbs feelings of joy and stunts aware appreciation of the beauty of the Earth.” ~The Seer
Deeply Greatful for this timely post Almine.
In my own life, pain has been a great initiator. Not because it was sought, but because it stripped illusion away and brought life to a higher order. Certain experiences cut so deeply that they reorganize perception itself. What stayed with me was not the event, but the new capacities it unlocked: clearer boundaries, without hesitation cutting ties with others displaying toxic or dysfunctional ways, sharper discernment, and a refusal to waste experience by bypassing what it revealed. Each time something died—an old way of being, a relationship, a future I believed in—new perception and brighter horizons arrived in its place. I could see through what I was previously blind to. I could act where I once froze. In that way, pain did become an ally—not by glorifying suffering, but by refusing to let it pass through me without extracting its power. Thank you Almine.
One slap maybe two is enough. Any more and it becomes trauma.