Someone at my tapping group last week responded to my viewpoint about the election with a blast of blame from her unprocessed grief.
I heard her out, and told her how sorry I was that she was in so much pain.
This woman and I were in two very different worlds, projecting two very different inner movies onto the screen of our lives.
Her movie is quite scary and painful, and quite popular.
In fact, she is in a theater that currently has standing room only.
I know it well.
I used to suffer terribly in response to all the suffering and injustice I saw in the world.
I know how it feels to have my heart breaking almost everywhere I look.
I felt it my duty to stand in solidarity with people in pain.
But there does come a time when you realize that you are free to leave any theater showing a scary and painful movie, and go visit the musical romantic comedy that’s playing right next door in the same multiplex.
I do not mean to invalidate or make wrong anyone’s emotional experience, or the fact that most people currently residing on earth believe there is only one movie playing, and they have to sit it out and suffer through it.
But I have left the matrix, and know that my joy and freedom can at least offer others a coming attraction, perhaps a trailer of a more joyful movie coming soon to a theater within you.
You buy a ticket to the happy film by giving more of your attention and appreciation to all the good the world has to offer.
There really are more choices and ways of perceiving life on this planet than being an empath unwittingly soaking up (and in) all the pain in the world.
Seeing injustice through the eyes of a wounded and broken heart eventually burns us out and creates dis-ease in the body.
But that burn-out is a good thing, because for most of us, it is only when we are totally defeated that we accept that another way is possible.
Suffering to help end suffering is a no-win scenario, an endlessly tragic movie filled with extremely rotten tomatoes.
The days of single movie theaters are long gone.
There’s no money in them.
Explore all the other choices the multiplex has to offer.
“Where there is sadness, let me sow joy.”
– Francis of Assisi
“There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach.”
-A Course in Miracles
PS. If you can use a little support in getting your butt out of a painful movie,
