How to transform pain into power. This episode is my perspective and tools that I have found helpful in my journey of physical, mental, and emotional pain.
I’m Christel Arcucci. You’re listening to the Embody Wealthy Podcast. The lightning path for women and empaths to quit people-pleasing, reclaim power, and create a pleasure-led legacy without apology.
Being human is a full spectrum experience. We will experience moments of incredible happiness, connection, love, joy, peace. We will also experience intense times of distress, struggle, darkness, illness, death of a loved one or a family.
I focus my work on your pleasure-led legacy, learning to navigate physical, mental, and emotional pain is essential in this exploration. While there are many teachings out there to think positive thoughts or be happy, that can bypass pain.
My approach is to acknowledge there is great pain and suffering in the world, and then choose what we do with the pain, struggle, suffering.
By embracing that struggle, the first thing to do is to breathe and come into the present moment as much as possible.
Expand your breath gently, without forcing. Anchor yourself in the environment that you are in.
Notice the sights, sounds, smells, textures, and tastes. It helps bring your attention more fully into the moment. In times of intensity, often the mind can hijack your experience and pull in extreme stress, distress, or trauma from the past.
While stressful things happened, the past and most important thing is to come into the moment, to breathe, to feel your body, even if it’s in pain.
Feel your emotions, even if they’re challenging.
I’m going to move forward with the remainder of this podcast from the perspective that you are in a safe environment, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually,
Come into the present moment by feeling more can amplify the intensity, of intense thoughts, emotions, or physical pain. Yet by breathing we can move out of a stress response.
The stress response is a natural response to stress, it is built in.
You don’t get to decide whether or not you have one. What you get to decide is how you respond to the stress.
My teaching helps you to come into the present to be with what is happening. If it is emotional distress, acknowledge the feeling. I feel sad. I feel depressed. I feel anxiety, I feel helpless. I feel powerless.
As you notice, I included, “I feel,” which is very important.
Instead of saying, I am hopeless, powerless or…
This is one fundamental way of shifting the experience of being able to turn pain into reclaiming a sense of power by feeling your feelings and noticing what is happening in your mind.
The power of the mind is extraordinary. It has created so much of the incredible things that we experience in humanity on earth right now. Yet also, the power of the mind can make things so much harder. It can make an experience of struggle a thousand times harder, depending upon what your mind is saying.
So it’s important to acknowledge the feelings, acknowledge the mental dialogue that’s happening in your mind. What is your mind telling you?
In times of intensity without training, the mind can go into what I would call the perpetrator or the bully, some people would call the villain.
It is part of the trauma triangle, which I have done many other episodes about the trauma triangle. There are 3 roles to play on the trauma triangle, victim, perpetrator, or rescuer.
In times of intensity, our own minds can become the perpetrator, being mean to ourselves. It can be self-attack, blaming, shaming, making wrong. It can be this incredible intensity that feels inescapable, right?
It’s coming from the inside and one way of turning this mental, emotional pain into power to change is by recognizing the emotions and mental dialogue by getting it out of your head and saying it out loud or writing it down.
I know that can seem challenging to do. You don’t want to give any energy to it. But, it’s like fighting a ghost.
The more that you can understand what your mind is saying to you, the more you can understand that loop that the mind gets stuck in when it’s feeling trapped or helpless or under intense stress.
The more we can understand what the story is that the mind is stuck in, then we can find ways of changing that story slowly and.
These practices are. Long-term strategies that absolutely work in support with whatever other support you are getting.
These are support tools to help you shift your experience to move out of feeling like a victim to your mental, emotional, or physical struggles and to support you to reclaim your power so you can shift your experience.
So getting clear on “I feel” and “the story I’m telling myself.” Again, it gives you some distance between the mind. When it’s in the perpetrator place, the bully, it can just declare things to be true.
As we move into physical sensations of pain all of these practices being able to see, feel, experience, the pain, whatever level it’s on, but also to be able to recognize there are other aspects of you.
So if there is a place in your physical body that feels pain to go into the pain. Feel it to gently breathe life energy into that part of your body.
Gently open the edges of where the physical pain lives, with the breath and with the power of attention. By moving your mind to a place where there’s physical pain in the body, it helps increase circulation, which moves more life force and oxygen to the area. It also can help reduce inflammation by moving out of a contracted state.
The physical aspect is breathing gently and moving gently, and being mindful of how your body is responding.
We talked about the perpetrator with the mental aspect, and the same is true for all levels of this is approaching yourself with kindness, care, compassion.
If you are with somebody who is deeply struggling, there can be this desire to save them from their suffering to rescue them. The R on VPR Triangle.
From my experience as both someone who has been through incredible intense tragedies in my life, but also someone who works with people and their struggles for a living the best thing that I can do in being with someone who’s struggling is to be with them, be beep present without trying to fix anything unless there is something that they’re specifically asking for that would help them.
You’re doing the same thing when it’s inside yourself, bringing your presence.
What I like to think of as my CEO self, the one who is in charge of everything, keeping that part in charge. Just like the CEO of a company understands what’s happening in the company, understands the employees are gonna have struggles, but the CEO stays in charge rather than letting a wounded part run the company or stop momentum moving forward.
The same thing is happening in your life. Okay, I’m really struggling right now, this is really hard and this wounded part of me is trying to hijack this whole situation and get me stuck in an emotional feedback loop or a downward mental spiral, or creating more physical pain by making choices that don’t support healing.
it’s important to recognize that your CEO self stays in charge. You could call that your infinite self, your higher self, whatever most resonates with you, and being open to the experience of all the parts.
The CEO self is never the perpetrator saying, “I don’t want to hear about your struggle. Just get back to work.”
Right? That’s a wounded or immature part. Staying in the CEO self, the CEO is able to hold the big picture and to also support in navigating the metaphorical ship of yourself through a storm, through the intensity.
If you were in a storm and the captain of a ship, if there was a crew member that was ill and down with a fever and hallucinating, you wouldn’t be like, “Hey, you should come steer the ship through this storm.”
But that’s often what happens when we give the power to direct and guide our life to a part that it is in deep pain and suffering mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, that is where things can go from bad to worse.
It is important to acknowledge the challenge, the suffering, the pain, yet keeping the CEO. In charge the executive function of your brain, which is a practice, right? Because when you go into fight or flight into a stress response even of please or freeze the survival part of your brain takes over.
Doing this practice of being able to feel pain in any way yet to keep your CEO self in charge, to acknowledge the pain, to validate the feelings, yet to make the best possible choices to navigate them.
Do these practices on a daily basis when it isn’t an extreme situation is the easiest way to make it a habit.
When you’re facing an incredibly stressful time that these practices are built, on acknowledging the emotions, validating the feelings, recognizing the story that the wounded mind is running, feeling physical pain, feeling spiritual pain, yet being able to stay in a, an empowered place to make the best possible choices.
This practice, doing this with yourself supports you in then being able to be with someone else who is struggling to be with them, and simply being with somebody in their pain, breathing with them.
Being with pain and suffering can make such a huge difference.
The last few years have amplified the mental health crisis, the health crisis in the US, which is where I’m based.
Learning to tend to ourselves first and be with each other when we’re in pain. Learning to move out of a stress response into an empowered place to make the best possible choices.
So much of what I see in the collective. Is V P R is the trauma triangle. It’s glorified on television, in media, this victim, perpetrator, or rescuer.
As we individually can step off of the trauma triangle to learn, to navigate our own intensity, our own pain, the things within ourselves that we don’t want to look, it makes us better able to look at what we see in other people that we’re not thrilled about, and to better be able to come together to make the world a better place for everyone.
A sustainable, loving, supportive environment for all people.
Take a gentle breath, if it feels good for you to let out a sigh or a sound with your exhale if you feel stressed in your body, gently moving, turning your head, rotating your wrists, moving your fingers, moving your hips, side to side, enlivening. your body with your breath.
As we learn to be with our own pain, whether it is pain from the past pain we are currently experiencing or fear of future pain, we become better able to be with and support others who are struggling.
As you are breathing, envision golden light in your heart center, swirling in your heart, enlivening your body, able to hold any human experience.
You’re able to love any human struggle.
Gently breathing in, gently breathing out.
Notice emotions. Notice mental thoughts. Notice physical sensations
As we move into deeper practice. I invite you to keep breathing gently, yet as deeply as you can. And moving into or closer to places that are challenging and then moving away into an area that feels more neutral or maybe even good.
For example, in this moment in my left sit bone, left hip, there is discomfort, physical discomfort. There is also a mental story attached to it from when I was injured. There are also emotions attached to this physical discomfort that I’m experiencing.
The tendency without practice is to get consumed by contraction, by the pain, by the mental, emotion, fear, or physical pain.
The practice is to be able to identify and notice the experience from the CEO self, from your higher self, from the observer.
There’s physical pain there. There’s a mental story connected and emotions, and as I move deeper into the contraction, it gets bigger. Then it moves up into my heart, all the way up into the left side of my head. My heart feels heavy. So instead of letting the contracted experience, the pain body take over, I move towards it but not too deep. I move closer to it. I breathe gently at the edges of it.
I hold the vision for healing life force to return to this physical, mental, emotional experience that I’m having.
Gentle breathing, awareness, noticing I’m breathing gently, yet as deeply as possible.
I’m allowing movement in my body so that I don’t get stuck in the contraction.
eExpansion, contraction, light, and dark, day and night, winter and summer. They are an expression of nature.
The parts of my experience that I don’t like aren’t bad or wrong. They are part of the experience that we chose in becoming human.
Shifting perception that pain is a problem, pain is an experience, gives you more power to make better choices, and to not collapse into pain or contraction.
Being able to breathe gently to notice, acknowledge, validate my experience without giving all my power to it, is where incredible transformation can happen.
Breathing gently and choosing what I want to experience. Breathing at the edges of the discomfort, bringing light and life into the contraction in my physical, mental, emotional.
Inhaling gently, exhaling softly.
If the practice gets too intense, then you are regulating yourself. You are choosing to move to a different area, whether that’s physical, mental, emotional.
I focus on the right side of my body where there’s greater freedom and ease. As I tune in energetically, it feels lighter.
My left hip, where I was focusing my attention feels heavier, denser, more solid, so I’m moving my awareness into and out of pain, contraction, tightness, heaviness to not make that wrong.
Making the experience of pain wrong fuels the power to stay stuck there.
Develop your ability to notice, acknowledge, validate your experience, shift your awareness to different parts of your experience and to use your power to choose.
What emotions do I feel now?
What emotions do I want to feel now in the intensity of a very difficult emotional experience?
it’s important not to gaslight yourself in saying, I feel fabulous if you don’t.
What do you want to feel?
I want to feel lighter. I want to feel greater freedom in my body, mind, heart, and a lot of people will say in speaking, wanting creates more wanting.
Listen to Ep 19 The Creative Power of your Desire for my perspective.
Movie from the deep contraction of pain and redirect your attention, your focus, your mental, emotional, physical power to shift towards what you want is an incredible transformation that happens little by little.
The ability to be with intensity, the ability to create a path in the present and into the future that is different than the automatic override of past pain or trauma.
Gentle practice of being with your own experience.
The more you can practice doing this with yourself, the easier it becomes to be with other people who are in an intense experience to be with rather than. Going back into the trauma triangle of trying to rescue someone.
Gentle breath, gentle awareness of your emotional experience, your emotional body, gentle awareness of your mental experience. And the way the patterns of the mind can hijack you into the past.
This practice is a pathway to create a different experience in the present and moving forward.
It is generally not going to be a quick fix. Where, poof, while your troubles are gone.
it is an invitation to shift the way you work with stress, pain, struggle, any of the less desirable or totally undesirable experiences that are part of being. When you’re able to see these experiences that we would rather not experience as part of being human, then we can use that experience to transform the present and the future.
Learn to use the experience of challenge to fuel creative projects in whatever form turns you on, whether that is through writing, speaking, touch, through connecting with family members or friends or in your business or your career.
When we take pain from being a problem and to acknowledge that it’s simply part of our experience and what can we do with.
With the challenging side of being human, how can that inform the present you are creating and the future you want to create?
If you are unfamiliar with my story, my work came out of iIntense physical, mental, emotional pain, and a desire to first heal myself, transform my own experience and my life, and to then be able to help others.
When I am struggling in an intense experience the most powerful thing that I do is ask myself how does this flavor of life force want to move in and through and as me?
As a creative, as an artist, as a healer a a human on the path of awakening my greatest potential t is essential, to acknowledge that pain is part of our experience.
What can I do with pain/challenge/struggle when it happens?
I deeply desire that it transforms my life and transforms the lives of the people close to me, and it transforms the future of humanity on earth.
Simple practices of being with your emotional experience, being with the mental story that you’re experiencing, NS being with your physical experience.
Find the invitation into greater expression of who you are and what you’re here to do.
This has been the most intense podcast episode I have created, and it’s so important because we’re in this intense time in the US in the middle of the winter holidays and so many people are struggling.
These practices of being with our own experience, being better able to be with others, to acknowledge the ways in which our culture is so dysfunctional and so many systems are hyper dysfunctional and bringing it back to how do I feel about pain?
How do I transform my experience in service to the greater good?
First acknowledging that it’s part of our human experience and then choosing how I handle it within myself and interact with others.
Transform pain into power by seeing it as life force energy that wants to move through me with a particular flavor to inspire certain actions in my life.
Life challenges can be incredibly healing to myself, those around me and all of humanity.
It’s a pleasure to co-create and embody wealthy with you.
For the first time ever in my coaching session I’m offering a single session, it’s called a Desire Session. The focus of the session is to discover why manifesting isn’t working for you and Access the Creative Power of Desire to Build your Pleasure-Led Legacy
It’s a one-to-one phone session includes: Pleasure Body Breath + Sensual Hypnosis + Akashic Recode + Recording. This is not a sales call, it’s the most exciting evolution of my work and I would love to share it with you. Book your: Desire Session
If you are interested to explore options to work with me please visit www.EmbodyyourLegacy.com to fill out an application.
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I believe in you and the magic power of your soul. I am sending you so much love!
You’re listening to the Embody Wealthy Podcast. The lightning path for women and empaths to quit people-pleasing, reclaim power, and create a pleasure-led legacy without apology.