The Countdown to 2012 continues … post 5.

Good Afternoon, fellow lightworkers and earth angels and newcomers to my website! Welcome to the fifth post of the countdown. (If you missed the pre-countdown post dated 12/13/11, you may enjoy reading that one first. You can also click on the tag “Countdown” at the end of this post and all the countdown posts will pop up. Just scroll to the bottom for the very first one.)

Motivational speakers often ask, what would you do if you knew you could not fail? Today I ask you what you would do if you could not feel the pain of failure. Then, let’s take it a step further and ask ourselves, What would we do if we could not feel pain at all?

There’s a parallel between emotional and physical pain. The one can exacerbate the other. Most of us have experienced this at some point — realizing we are irritable when we wouldn’t normally be in the same situation if we didn’t have a headache, a backache, etc. Or we may have gotten a small injury (stubbed toe, etc.) in the midst of a bad day that brought us to tears when that injury normally would have been experienced only as physical pain and not also emotional pain.

There is a rare genetic disease, known as CIPA or Congenital Insensitivity to Pain with Anhidrosis, wherein the afflicted person cannot feel sensitivity to heat, cold, or pain. They can feel the pleasure associated with hugs, kisses, etc., because it is sourced in emotional joy. However, they cannot feel the emotional joy/pleasure associated with a warm bath, a hot shower, or the cool water of a swimming pool on a hot day. Neither can people whose hearts are closed. The closed-hearted person can feel (perceive) the cool or warm temperature but cannot derive joy from the beauty of this contrast between hot and cold, contrast that only Separation from God allows us to perceive.

While our soul is merged into Oneness with God before we experience inhabiting a physical body on Earth via Separation, we know Joy but only Joy; ironically, we don’t know that we know it, because we know nothing else to compare and contrast it with. We have no perception of our Self as existing or as having an identity while our souls are merged into Oneness. The best Earth parallel to Oneness with God is the symbiosis we experience while gestating in our mother’s womb. That symbiosis is very similar to Oneness with God, a place where our needs are met all the time and we never know desire for anything.

Separation allows us to perceive both pain and pleasure; the human survival instinct compels us to protect us against pain, especially the pain of sadness, shame, and danger to both the physical and emotional self. So not only are we compelled to flee or fight someone who would attack us with weapons, we are also compelled (by the survival instinct) to protect ourselves from someone who would attack us with words as weapons. Attack by weapons endangers our physical self (our body) and attack by words as weapons endangers our sense of self as worthy of existing. This is why we often feel mixed emotions during the holidays: we look forward to those encounters with friends and family members that will bring us emotional pleasure (joy) and sometimes dread those encounters with friends and family members that are likely to involve being attacked with words as weapons and bring us emotional pain (sadness, shame, etc.). Tomorrow’s Countdown Post will be about how to deal with that pain and other kinds of pain related to psychic attack.

The pain of the prospect of failure, too, is very uncomfortable. Not only could we attempt a new game plan for our lives or implement a new strategy in order to achieve our goals, we could possibly not succeed. At the beginning of this post, we asked ourselves what we would do if we knew we could not feel the pain of failure. In other words, what if we could not feel the discomfort of sadness, shame and danger? What if you risked your life savings in starting a new business and you lost it all, but no longer having that money did not cause pain? What if you wrote and directed a play for a prestigious festival, and it got terrible reviews and you were not invited back the next year, but that criticism and rejection were not painful? Now, my desire is not to give you a magical potion that will make pain not painful. My desire here is to reveal that forgiving daily transforms feelings of downheartedness, disappointment, and failure (all variations of pain) back into inspiration, drive, and joy (which are all expressions of our emotional awareness of God’s Love for us).

People who “get back on the horse” or “try, try, try again” are driven. When we are driven, success becomes a matter of probability. I once had a twitter follower whose 140 character bio read (I’m paraphrasing here to the best of my memory), “Opened twenty-one businesses: 11 million dollar companies and 10 failures. Tweeting tips for small business owners.” So for this type of person, a failure is not devastating, humiliating or dangerous; their survival instinct doesn’t compel them to protect themselves from the sadness, shame and danger of a failed business because they wouldn’t feel any! However, they might perceive something else as terrifying, such as a romantic relationship, that another person would not feel compelled to avoid the possibility of. Fascinatingly, an excess of drive can indicate a closed heart. This type of person will not feel sadness (or any other kind of pain) if their success comes at the cost of other people’s quality or quantity of life. They lack empathy and do not typically feel sadness or the pain of loss ever. So they take more risks than the average person and succeed more than the average person simply because they have made many more attempts!

Earlier, we referenced the disease CIPA and the parallel between not being able to feel physical pain and not being able to feel emotional pain. Many people with the disease do not make it to their twenties before ending up in a wheelchair. The reason for this is they do not feel the physical exhaustion (discomfort) that is its own indicator of the imminent danger of injury. So you and I might run four miles, four days a week, for months, but the one day we push it and run six miles, we feel exhausted and just don’t “feel like” running again for a week. It’s not because we don’t want to. Actually, the lack of desire is because our body doesn’t want us to. People with CIPA don’t get these internal queues to take it easy, relax, and recover from extreme physical exertion. They experience so much wear and tear on their joints — self-inflicted because their body isn’t giving them any discomfort flags to slow them down — that after many years, they end up unable to walk. As babies and children, they also experience a multitude of injuries that go unnoticed by their parents because they don’t scream or cry when the accident happens the way a child without CIPA would because the accident or injury doesn’t cause them to feel pain.

Imagine what it would feel like to feel no emotional pain when you made a mistake — no regret, no embarrassment, no disappointment, and no fear of repeated failure. You would never give up and you would always go after what you wanted. Forgiveness can’t make you unhuman and take away your ability to reflect. Our ability to reflect is what makes us different from animals. We have a conscience that is based in our ability to reflect on the outcomes of our actions, especially the impact they had or will have on our and other people’s emotions. Our empathy with and sympathy for the effects of those actions on our and other people’s quality and quantity of life is at the core of the open-hearted human’s conscience or “moral compass.” In fact, if we lacked empathy, we would have the emotional equivalent of CIPA, and we would be sociopaths or psychopaths!

The more open our heart is, the more empathetic we will become. The greatest of all the greater goods of empathy is that our ability to perceive pain is what drives us to stop the source of it! And as lightworkers, our ability to perceive other people’s pain — because of our heightened degree of empathy — is what drives us to take action to stop the source of their pain (by taking social justice actions, signing petitions, protesting injustice, taking political action, voting with our money and our time for fair trade and sustainable industry, etc.). So for just a moment, please imagine what you would do if you couldn’t feel pain, if failure became a moot point because you were unable — incapable — of feeling the pain of any failure-associated emotions such sadness, shame and danger.

Taking risks is the epitome of success. At the same time, the desire to protect ourselves from pain is totally normal and generally healthy. The open heart sees the degree of risk and has a much clearer perception of the true probability of failure — how high or low it really is because an open heart causes an open mind. So when the fourth chakra is open, we don’t take foolish risks nor are we compelled to dim our light (a.k.a. Dimmer Switch Syndrome that so many lightworkers struggle with) and take no action because of the risk of failure involved.

Forgiving daily opens the heart. Forgiving others and ourselves refuels us with inspiration, which sheds the light of clarity on what we really desire, and drive, which fills us with all the energy to take action in ways that only bring joy to ourselves and others, and in the most efficient ways. When considering what you would like to do to bring joy to your own life, and to the world through your Lightworker world-service in the year 2012, you might make a short list of your goals. Then, consider jotting down a few times you didn’t take action and you wish you did and a few times you took action and wish you hadn’t. Addressing regret with forgiveness will open your heart and prevent you from hurting yourself in the same way again.

Forgiveness is a prayer — a desire given to God — for our own or another person’s happiness. Happiness is Joy, the emotion that indicates that we are able to feel God’s Love. So when we say, “I’m happy” what we mean is, “I can feel God’s Love for me right now.” When we can feel God’s Love, we don’t take actions that hurt ourselves or other people. Why? Because we have no desire — or compulsion — to. Procrastination is a big challenge for some lightworkers. It’s rooted in the desire to submissively dim our light so that we don’t threaten other people by making them feel inferior when they compare and contrast their levels of confidence and success and happiness to ours and feel short-changed. If you have procrastinated in the past or in any other way sabotaged your success (experienced the throes of Dimmer Switch Syndrome), take a moment to forgive yourself. You could simply ask God, “Please, God, heal me of all pain and sadness and fill my heart with Love. Please, God, don’t let me hurt myself again in the same way by dimming my light and _________ (specify how you have sabotaged your success) during the year 2012.” Then you might add on, “Please, God, let everyone on Earth be healed of all pain and sadness and filled with Joy!” Why would we want to do this? Because people who can feel God’s Love do not hurt others. Why? Because they have no desire to.

Angel blessings and prayers for an awesome and productive 2012 for you and the World,

Snow Angel

12/23/11

Sources: Two articles on the disease known as CIPA.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6379795/ns/health-childrens_health/t/rare-disease-makes-girl-unable-feel-pain/

http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20146647,00.html