Elaine

Its every parents nightmare and it was happening to me, but not as a dream. It was real. My teenaged daughter, my baby, sat on the examining table in the Emergency Room, her face a mask of pain as tears rolled down her cheeks. At only 100 pounds she seemed so little and vulnerable. After having her four wisdom teeth removed there were complications.

Her TMJ was worse and now her jaw was locked. She was in excruciating pain that radiated from her jaw up the side of her head to her ear. Later, after reading about her condition online, I would learn that some women have said this pain is worse than the pain of childbirth. When women talk about pain that is worse than childbirth, I pay attention.

To make matters worse she has a fear of needles. As a hypnotherapist Id treated many people for phobias, but not my own daughter. Your own family members do not make good clients so success rates are low. I didnt want her to fail with hypnosis with me and lose faith in it so that another hypnotherapist would find it more difficult to help her. Somehow, we had never gotten around to dealing with her phobia.

The doctor had prescribed a needle and she was having a meltdown. That meant more pain and more fear. I talked her through the shot, but even the strong narcotic did little to ease her pain. While she laid on the examining table, sobbing, I remembered taking her to the doctors when she was little, how she would beg me not to let them draw blood. It was so often a painful fiasco with her small, hard to locate veins, but I would always find a way to get it done.

I always felt her pain, suffering along with her and finding some way to distract her if I could. Sometimes I would let her squeeze my fingers as hard as she could, feigning pain and yowling and carrying on, distracting her while she got her needle. I had started to master those techniques years ago with her older brother. He was now in the ER with us. Like a good older brother, hed accompanied his little sister to the ER.

Not so many years before, Id watched him being wheeled from the ER with hoses and wires attached to his body and a defibrillator on his gurney, as they wheeled him to the cardiac ICU. A reaction to a drug for pain had caused fluid to build up around his heart, causing intense pain and cardiac distress. I helplessly watched my usually strapping, healthy, though-guy son who was then pale and lying on that gurney, his breathing shallow and labored. He made it and now was in the ER with his sister who was going through her own crisis. He has a son of his own and I know he will probably go through what almost every parent experiences, helplessly watching while a child suffers. Whether it is our own child or someone elses it is never easy. The suffering and sometimes death of a child is perhaps the most incomprehensible of experiences for some people.

In my book, Your Loved Ones, Your Self; Finding and Raising the Family Within I wrote about our Loved Ones. They are the part of our own Higher Consciousness that creates us and projects us into this world. You might call Loved Ones, Spirit Parents. Higher Consciousness, in another dimension, or domain, individualizes so that each of us has our own personal Higher Self. It is the same Higher Self that Jesus called the Father when he said, I am in the Father and the Father is in me.

God is inscrutable to the human mind, but our own part of Higher Consciousness, our Loved Ones, are our link to God. Just as our Loved Ones, the Father, are in us and we are in them, God is in us and we are in God (multiplicity). So while we as human earthly parents suffer, watching our childrens suffering, our own Spirit Parents and our childrens Spirit Parents are experiencing the suffering as well, but in a different awareness. They understand the purpose of the suffering and the benefit because they have divine understanding. But perhaps, on some level, they may still suffer, and that may be part of their evolutionary path. Because, you see, evolving and maturing is what these lives, experiences, and pain are all about. Just as we and our children mature and grow with each experience, the different parts of consciousness grow and evolve as well.

Each life, and each experience in that life, is a gift. Pain, as distressing as it may be in human terms, is a gift. We cannot evolve, learn detachment, and enter into Higher Consciousness, bliss, without pain and suffering. The passage to Higher Consciousness is through Trial by Life and that life includes pain. Though we may learn to deal with our own pain, it is much harder to be detached even thankful, when our beloved, fragile child is crying in pain, frightened, and confused. Does this mean we should stand by and let anyone suffer and not try to relieve the suffering? Certainly not.

It would be nice if we could help our child to understand the reason for pain and suffering and to detach himself or herself from the pain, but a childs understanding is limited. How do you explain to a child that pain is a gift and that he or she, through Higher Consciousness, chose the pain before entering this world? You cant. Therefore, we are forced to face pain through our children, there is no escaping it on this plane of existence until we evolve and detach ourselves from it. Before your child was born he or she made a choice to feel pain so that you could not escape it or manage it like you manage your own pain. The suffering of our children is the ultimate opportunity for the test of faith and detachment. That opportunity is a gift from our children to us. Only with understanding of the evolutionary process of consciousness and the acceptance of our roles as witnesses and participants can we successfully see the pain for the illusion and opportunity that it is.

Be thankful for the moments of joy and happiness in life. They are gifts of love from our Loved Ones. Be thankful for pain and suffering, even your childs suffering, because that is a manifestation of an even greater love. While you and your child suffer the universe suffers with you as well. If you have trouble accepting pain and suffering as gifts, just think of your life and the times you have grown, matured, and moved forward in life. What caused your greatest evolution? Was it peaceful happy times or times when you were challenged? The old saying, What doesnt kill you will make you stronger, has a ring of truth.

Pain and pleasure are two ends of the same stick. While the experiences seem very real to our conscious and subconscious minds, to our Higher Consciousness our Loved Ones, who we really are, they are illusions. They are parts in a play acted out on this stage. We are both players and audience. That is multiplicity, one of the hardest principles of existence the human mind can ever try to understand, but it must or you are doomed to repeat the cycle of pain. The purpose of pain and suffering is to teach us detachment and move us to a higher consciousness.

Pain and suffering are the greatest gift of love. Love and gratitude for each moment of life, whether pleasurable or painful, are the key to freedom from pain and the attainment of eternal bliss. That is why, though it is hard to comprehend from a human standpoint, as a father and grandfather, I say, be thankful for your childs suffering. Also, remember that you are setting an example that will help lead your child to Higher Consciousness and the detachment he or she will need to rise above earthly suffering to heavenly bliss.

http://yourlovedonesyourself.com

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