Convergence Healing: Healing Pain with Energetic Love - Softcover

With an MA in consciousness studies and his extensive training in hypnotherapy and alternative health, Peter Bedard has helped thousands of people overcome pain and the fearful shadow it has cast over their lives. Peter has a thriving one-on-one private practice, and he gives talks and workshops around the world. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

Brian Sheffield Hunt is a screenwriter and author living in Los Angeles, California. He was healed by the Convergence Healing process himself, and he’s proud to be helping to bring the transformative power of Convergence Healing to millions of readers. 

Convergence Healing CHAPTER ONE

The Gift of Pain

Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible.

—Eckhart Tolle

Where does it hurt?

I know this seems like an odd way to begin a book, but I honestly want to know: Are you, at this very moment, experiencing some kind of pain? Is your heart aching? Are your bones or back bothering you? Is your spirit agitated or restless? I’m guessing that, more than likely, you are murmuring yes.

That’s because pain is the great unifier and leveler; all of us wonderful human beings, no matter how rich, smart, or loved we are, experience debilitating pain at some point in our lives. This pain may be physical, or it may be spiritual or emotional. Or it may be all three. What I’ve come to understand is that pain is one of the most potent forces we will ever encounter, and I’ve devoted my life to helping as many people as I can understand that pain can be a force for good.

So, tell me. Are you in pain?

When I recently posed the question to a circle of friends, the range of responses I received confirmed what I’ve come to know: all of us experience pain in one form or another, and most of us allow our pain to limit our beliefs about who we are and what we can do. Here are a smattering of the responses I received:

“The first thing that comes to my mind is limitation. Not being able to do what I want because of being in too much physical pain.”

“I knew I was in intense pain when I did not feel anything. I could tell it was my body protecting me from something it knew I could not handle yet.”

“The first thing that comes to mind when I think of pain is the horrible pain of addiction—right before I finally waved the white flag. No physical pain has ever come close.”

“Root canal!!!!!!”

“The pain of losing a loved one. For me, it was almost unbearable.”

“When I think of pain, I think of being alone. That is the worst possible pain.”

According to data released by the International Association for the Study of Pain and the European Pain Federation and endorsed by the World Health Organization, pain reportedly affects one in five people worldwide in the form of mostly moderate to severe chronic pain. With one-fifth of the globe’s population suffering, it is no wonder that we are forever on the hunt for newer and better ways to secure relief from our pain.

Over two thousand years ago, the early Greeks and Romans were developing rudimentary ideas about the role our brain plays in producing the perception of pain and ways to counteract this influence. In the nineteenth century, opiates such as morphine were widely used to relieve pain, and German chemist Felix Hoffmann developed the first medically useful form of aspirin from a substance in willow bark. Today, aspirin remains the most commonly used pain reliever and is, in and of itself, a billion-dollar global drug business. And then, of course, there are the opioids such as Oxycontin, which remain overly prescribed despite the high risk of addiction. During my own struggle with chronic pain, I was offered but refused many drugs. It wasn’t until I went in and made peace with the person I was while in pain that I was able to find relief from my pain—without ever needing to pick up a substance, get surgery, or in any other way alter my mind or body.

Convergence Healing is about learning to listen to the wisdom your pain has to share, and allowing this wisdom to unlock those parts of yourself that have been shut down, hidden, or otherwise disenfranchised so that you can heal and become whole again.

Pain is the ultimate paradox. When we injure ourselves, we feel broken. And we are broken at those moments, but usually not in the ways that we think. That is because pain can be misleading, distracting, or downright deceiving if we don’t meet it head-on. What you will learn in Convergence Healing is how to face your pain’s power with your own personal power. When you do this, you will realize that you are more than your pain.

What exactly is pain? Is it a cluster of nerve endings that have been traumatized? Is it an unmet need or longing in our hearts? Is it an unhelpful yet deeply entrenched train of thought? A basic, clinical definition describes pain as “the physical feeling caused by disease, injury, or something that hurts the body.” A secondary definition goes a bit further, adding that pain can also be “sadness caused by mental or emotional suffering.”

The Latin word poena, the origin for our English word “pain,” means penalty or suffering inflicted as punishment for an offense. In Greek mythology, Poine was a lesser goddess of retribution, vengeance, and punishment. Many ancient cultures believed pain and disease were punishment for human folly. To rid people of pain, ancient healers used magic and spiritualism in an attempt to appease angry gods, often by engaging in rituals, offerings, and sacrifices that involved a lot of pain. In ancient times, the thinking went: What are you willing to suffer and sacrifice to be rid of your pain?

Today, we think of pain as a symptom that should be eliminated as quickly as possible. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to avoid or not feel our pain. So we turn to drugs, surgery, and a whole host of unhealthy behaviors (drinking, overeating, overspending), believing that if we can just wipe out whatever pain we are feeling, we will be good to go.

Unfortunately, we have it all wrong. Yes, pain is a symptom of something larger that ails us. It is absolutely a messenger of sorts. How will we ever get the message if we shoot (or medicate) the messenger before we have given it a chance to speak? In other words, in our modern world, which favors numbing out over raw, real experience, we are too eager to eliminate pain and so we miss out on gleaning the wisdom it has for us. Paradoxically, when we focus on suppressing our pain without knowing what it really is, we make it all the stronger. This is when physical pain or mental anguish (negative thinking) overwhelm us and become chronic. This is when we lose ourselves to pain.

All of us experience pain. It is a fundamental experience of being a living, breathing person on this planet. There are basically two types of pain we may experience. Acute pain is short, sharp, and often very shocking. This is the kind of pain we experience when we are in a car accident or when we are struck by an intense medical condition, such as appendicitis. Acute pain is usually associated with physical injury, like the excruciating pain of breaking a bone or the crushing experience of having a car door slammed on your finger. Cells in the injured tissue at the site of impact emit chemicals that activate local nerve endings. The stirred-up nerve endings send an electrochemical impulse via the nerves to the spinal cord. The impulse then travels to the thalamus part of the brain and continues on to its destination, the cerebral cortex. This type of pain is relatively straightforward—and short-lived. It is a complex set of neurological reactions that give us a very clear message. Ouch! Stop what you are doing and pay attention to me!

Chronic pain is the more insidious kind of pain because it tends to outwit and outlast whatever Western treatments we throw at it. Typically starting out as a physical reaction to some form of accident or trauma, chronic pain, whatever its origin, tends to latch onto our psyches with a vengeance, taking us hostage. Our pain, if left untreated and allowed to become chronic, can take us over—body, mind, and soul. If we are not careful, it can actually become us.

We humans tend to experience pain in the three most important realms of our existence: the physical, the emotional, and the spiritual. Sometimes pain that begins in one realm bleeds into another and we experience pain on several levels at once. For example, a woman who was abused suffers deep emotional and psychic pain, but she may also experience physical pain in her lower back or pelvic floor. A man who was unable to protect his family from physical harm may suffer from seemingly unrelated severe neck and shoulder pain, which masks the true source of his pain—his core emotional trauma. Or, an athlete who strains her knee may feel the emotional anguish of having let her teammates down when she is unable to compete with them. Inevitably, when one part of us is injured, it has a domino effect on the other essential parts of ourselves. This is why I believe, from years of working with thousands of clients, that when we experience pain it not only exists on all levels but must be treated on all levels.

Physical pain is the easiest type of pain to identify—and to heal, especially when it involves a superficial wound, one that can be seen by the naked eye. Physical pain, because of its obviousness, is also the type of pain we are less inclined to judge. It is a different story when it comes to emotional or spiritual pain.

Emotional pain is an affective response to a life event. We all understand the pain of grieving, especially when someone loved dies too soon or leaves this planet suddenly. Emotional pain, unlike physical pain, triggers a process that usually needs more time and attention. How many of us have experienced the pain of stubbing a toe as being “no big deal” when compared to the pain we feel when we have been dumped by someone we thought was “the one”? Though no flesh has been torn or blood shed, our hearts are wounded in ways that will inhibit our ability to lead full and fulfilling lives if we do not adequately process that pain.

The same is true of pain that hits us hard on the spiritual level, and this type of pain is, I believe, the most difficult to identify and heal (at least, when using traditional Western methodologies, such as counseling).

In La Cultura: Conceptual Strategies to Understand Identity, Diversity, Otherness and the Difference, Patricio Guerrero Arias refers to spiritual pain as the “disruption in the principle which pervades a person’s entire being and which integrates and transcends one’s biological and psychosocial nature.” Christian hospice chaplain Tom Allain’s years of experience led him to define spiritual pain as occurring when “there is an event that violates the core values, beliefs, or needs of the person.” NANDA International describes spiritual pain as “a state of disorder in a person’s inner core. It might be a chronic or an acute heartache, an existential dissonance that expresses itself in behavioral incongruities. An important characteristic is that it is a pain appropriate medication does not relieve.” They list the experiential features of spiritual pain as follows:

· Disconnection from others; unwillingness to engage

· Preoccupation with self

· Feeling outcast and alone

· Expressing a loss of future

· Feeling abandoned

· Distress, despair, withdrawal

· No joy in anything

· Pain is fixed

· Feeling trapped

· Anger, shame, guilt

Addressing emotional or spiritual pain is where modern medicine, too, fails us. For example, a young man suffering from sexual dysfunction (physical pain) often has a deep fear of intimacy (emotional pain) and his heart (spiritual pain) feels alone and unloved in the world. A new mother may be hurting from a lack of support from her husband (emotional pain) and as a result be unable to relax and breast-feed her child (physical pain), which may lead her into a deep, postpartum depression (spiritual pain).

In the end, it does not matter where our pain originates. What matters is how we honor our experience of pain and how we listen to what it is trying to teach us. I know this because I let my own pain, a pain that was initially physical but became spiritual and emotional, hold me hostage for most of my life. Until I freed myself with Convergence Healing.
THE NIGHT I DIED

I gaze down at my lifeless body. I am dead. No pulse, no heartbeat, no breath. I am simply dead. I never see this coming. Everything happens so fast.

Tops, I’m traveling twenty miles per hour. I’m riding along a twisty suburban road on my little yellow Motobecane, under the light of a full moon. I am too busy being angry and put out to appreciate the beautiful nighttime scene I am a part of. Lost in my thoughts, I am having a heated, internal argument with my parents. I’m only seventeen years old, but I resent my parents for not trusting me more. I want to go to a cast party, but my parents told me I could not go, so instead I am being the good son and going home.

As I am riding along, fuming, a big car roars up behind me. I lean into a curve in the road ahead as the car’s white headlights flash brightly in my side-view mirrors. The light is blinding.

Up ahead, I see too late that a parked semitruck is entirely blocking my way. I am driving near the curb and only a few feet from the rear of the truck when my scooter is bumped from behind. Time strangely slows down as I jump out of my body just before impact and watch the accident unfold in front of me. My body is slammed into the steel tailgate of the semitruck. I float above the side of the road and watch in slow motion as my body smashes into the truck. I watch myself bounce off the rear of the semi and into the middle of the road. There is a strange silence and a profound peace. I notice that my body is not moving.

My scooter, my prized possession, is a mangled yellow metal mess. Blood oozes from my scraped-up face and my knee is bent at a grotesque angle. A budding dancer with my heart set on a Broadway career, I remember thinking, “This cannot be good,” though with every second that passes I am more and more detached from any sensation of pain or even an opinion about what is happening in front of me. In fact, I watch these things, feeling a strange deepening sense of peace and calm. I am detached. I am aware that there is pain, but I do not feel any of it.

No one else is on the road. I feel utterly alone yet utterly at peace. I find myself drifting upward and hovering high over the accident. The car that hit me drives off as the stillness of the night returns.

Then I depart.

One second I am calmly awaiting the moment a car runs over and crushes my dead body, the next I am rushing, floating fast along a white otherworldly tunnel. Being drawn down this spinning tunnel of white clouds is absolute bliss. The tunnel corkscrew spins and I am shooting like a comet through it, experiencing love and joy like I have never known. As I ascend through this tunnel of light, I become less and less interested in what I am leaving behind. I am not just at peace. I am peace.

I arrive. I am here . . . wherever “here” is. Heaven, or whatever this place is, looks exactly how other people generally describe it. There are no billowy clouds, just massive whiteness. It is soft, brilliantly white, yet diffused. I sense that there is a floor, and that I am standing on it, but I cannot see it. Ceilings and walls do not exist here; there is only brilliance, an inherent living light. I even feel like I am in a defined space . . . if you can somehow define a room made up of infinity. With each passing second my heart beats with more expansive joy.

I begin to explore this place of vast nothingness. I am so curious. My curiosity is overwhelming. . . . It is even fun and it feels like play to explore and try to understand this place. It feels like a lot of time goes by. I feel as though I have been floating in this place of stillness...