I know when I was in the depth of my journey with endometriosis and I was experiencing daily pain, I felt mostly anger. Anger at a system that couldn’t help me. Anger at my body for creating this disease. Anger for endometriosis itself. I felt anger but also a deep longing for it to change and for it to leave. The anger was stemming from a place where I couldn’t get control over the endometriosis or the pain that came with it. I felt frustrated that no matter how many surgeries I had or how many treatments I took, nothing changed. It felt like a losing battle. A battle I felt like I was failing at. It all felt so hopeless and like an endless series of days of pain upon pain.
Perhaps I had to get angry? Perhaps it was the anger that fuelled so much of the change I was able to create in my diet and my life. Maybe that is the cross-roads we need to get through to come out of it the other side and to finally reach that compassionate place for ourselves? Sometimes anger serves a place for real change and perhaps directing it at something actually ignites us to make real changes?
I think for me… I needed to get to the place of saying: “enough is enough” after the 7th surgery. I needed to come to that realisation that I couldn’t carry on like that and then do everything in my power to avoid going back to that place ever again.
The anger ultimately fuelled me but it was real compassion for my body and myself that healed me.
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I actually believe we need the anger to be ignited. We need to feel such frustration with our lives or our pain levels to be the point where we almost quit and decide that something has to change. The discomfort needs to be great enough for us to want to shift it.
We move out of that dull comfortable, yet miserable space into a place of action and change.
Knowingly, many of us can sit in the yucky, dull comfort space for years – I know I did. There is something safe about that space and to be honest, we are gaining something there – even if we don’t want to admit it. (read more on that here)
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Though the anger can be the fuel for wanting to change, I believe that it is compassion that ultimately heals us. Anger has a strong but also vicious and often impatient energy around it. It insists on things to happen quickly and doesn’t invite love or inner knowing. It wants things resolved and is also often resistant to opening up that deep, hurt place which is often the trigger for real healing.
It is when we move into compassion that things really begin to change. We don’t shift our diet because we “just want the pain to go away” or try every supplement in the hope that one will just work already! We aren’t driven from that same space. Instead, we invite a healing and a knowing that our body knows how to heal. We tune inward and listen. Listen to the foods which make us feel good, listen to the sounds that soothe us and come to an acceptance around having endometriosis but mostly about who we are as woman.
We become the loving parent to our own inner child. The one that desperately wants and needs love and care. That voice that needs to hear that we are good enough and we are loveable and that there is nothing wrong with us. We aren’t broken and everything we are and what we do is in of itself more than what we have been telling ourselves. We approve of who we are and we can love every inch of our body and our inner being.
That is true compassion and when we reach that place, healing is truly possible because we stop resisting and we just start trusting.
Perhaps we would never reach that space if it weren’t for the gut wrenching pain. Perhaps we would never look deep enough and perhaps that is the secret benefit of experiencing it?
