The Inner Task of Feeling

“When we become aware that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can mobilize them into a common search for life, those very pains are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope.”

~Henri Nouwen

A license to healing,

Is issued to the one;

The one who feels,

And surrenders their fun.

But the last laugh’s theirs,

As healing engenders fun,

All they can manage,

Under the sun.

The process of spiritual healing is inside-out. We must venture beyond ourselves to reclaim our core and essential selves. In certain respects we must deconstruct what we’ve become in order to reconstruct what we can be.

There is a risk, but oh, what a return!

A license to healing is afforded the person who feels; one who is able, for a time, to surrender their fun. And the last word is given to the consequences of healing; real and raw fun is, at last, known.

Suddenly, when all manner of sacrifice and surrender has opened at the expense of freedom, we enjoy the surreal splendour of fun beyond previous comprehension; all we can manage, under the sun.

Sometimes we must let go in order to receive that which is coming.

A Process Taking No Prisoners

If we would help someone, anyone, with their distress, which is tapping into their feelings with unabridged candour, then we too must make a similar journey.

We, too, must take on this inner task of feeling. We, too, must go to those painful and lonely places. And it’s not just to their lonely and painful places we must go, but to our lonely and painful places, too.

All the processes of feeling require are an honest courage to go where God asks us to go. As we journey within, knowing there’s no way back, and strident in our commitment, we learn to drink deeply of the lonely sadness and pain previously untouched. We learn here that there’s really no fear. The pain, like a razor cutting paper, is so clean it could be likened as healing in itself.

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Beyond the numbness and into the divinity of movement, our pain approves passage into the making of a better ‘us’.

***

The inner task of feeling,

Is the cherished work of healing,

And this gives rise,

At its end—to salvation’s prize.

The treasured knowledge of an endured pain is that perseverance takes us eventually to salvation’s prize. Because we have felt, and we have not shirked the truth, we have entered the work of healing. And with aplomb we’re blessed with the blessing of God.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.