Transmutation
“What you intended against me for evil, God Intended for good” - Genesis 50:20
Suffering defines our lives. We don’t seek it, but we won’t escape it in this world. We experience suffering when we push up against the boundaries of our beings or when the world decides to push back against us.
We, like all of life, are always changing. When we grow we suffer as we struggle to move beyond what’s comfortable. When we atrophy we suffer as we grapple with grief at the loss of our capabilities. Pain is along for the journey either way.
The limits of every man are defined by his suffering, even Christ; the life of our savior is centered around the Passion, the Cross, and his victory over death showing he was capable of completely overcoming suffering. How much more is the shape of our meager beings molded by the pains of living in this fallen world?
But we are not passive participants to be weathered and eroded like rocks; we have agency regarding the mode which this suffering defines us.
We can shrink away and give ground instead of embracing the struggle and reduce our capacity to act in the world accordingly. Or we can attempt to clumsily bulldoze past the obstacles that face us, and maybe they’ll be overcome -temporarily- at the cost of hurting self or other. Neither of these options can ever lead to peace. Christ did not run from the cross, and neither did he dismiss it or diminish it’s import. How profaning would it have been to record Christ yelling “This Cross, this pain, is nothing to me!” in the Gospels. Writing those words caused me to mentally hurl.
But do we not do this in our own lives every day? We feel hurt and pain. Perhaps some callous words cut our hearts and we mentally dismiss them as “just nonsense.” Perhaps we feel tired and irrationally demand our bodies be otherwise. Perhaps we pretend to be strong and stoic in order to hide the heavy feelings associated with our fears and insecurities. We take a thousand cuts and bruises each day and still say “My cross isn’t heavy. This pain isn’t real. It’s beneath me.” This mindset isn’t any nobler than running from the pain entirely; denial is just another form of shirking one’s duty.
If avoidance and denial are closed to us then what’s left? We have to face the suffering in it’s entirety and embrace it.
We have to practice transmutation -to learn to transform the heavy energies of pain and hurt into catalysts of meaning: to deepen our connection with self, others, and God; to discover more powerful ways to express our inner beings; to strengthen our capacity for compassion by expanding the depth and breadth of what we will accept in our hearts.
Christ used the suffering found on the cross to defeat death, redeem man’s fallen nature, and express the infinite magnitude of God’s humility, compassion, forgiveness, and love for Mankind. It’s safe to say none of us will ever match such an achievement, but we have the opportunity to imitate it many times each day when we grapple with the unpleasant and painful emotions and experiences that arise in the course of our lives.
Transmutation of suffering is a skill that should develop as we mature. Receiving a hurtful insult will never magically become a pleasant event, but by grappling with the pain of those words we open channels in our hearts designed to filter the emotions through and transmute it into compassion and other virtuous behaviors. At first for ourselves, and then eventually for others.
Every time we do this, no matter how small, we participate in healing the world. Growth is, in large part, learning to transmute different types and degrees of painful experiences into compassion, beauty, and virtue. We learn to deal with our internal anger in a healthy manner, and that expands to being able to relate to and possibly even calm angry people we experience in life. We learn to deal with hurt and pain and we gain the ability to comfort ourselves and empathize with others.
This act isn’t a purely intellectual endeavor; the mind guides us through the process, but it is not the arbiter of the final result. We do not impose some top-down theory or grand design of the exact substance the suffering will be transformed into. It’s a bit like gardening; we till the soil, water the seeds, and pick away the weeds. Yet, the gardener doesn’t have the final say about the pattern in which the leaves unfurl.
My nascent and still-developing understanding of the process separates it into four phases:
Acknowledgement
The first step is to acknowledge the pain and unpleasant sensations. Easier said than done.
The mind and body have a vast network of mechanisms designed to filter traumatic experiences and forbidden emotions from conscious awareness. This is not caused by a schism within the indivdual; it could be for good reason: the intensity of the experience is too much in the moment. Maybe there is already a backlog of accumulated stress, or pressing survival obligations require the full capacity of the individual. In that case the benefits of dissociation outweigh the cost, and processing an event is put off to another time. However, these mechanisms become easily pathologized when relied upon indefinitely and form ingrained and sticky habits that we struggle to change.
So acknowledgement consists of three main components: lowering stress levels enough to regain the capacity to become aware and present of the realized emotional state, awareness of the tactics the body and mind use to hide the emotional reality from your consciousness, and a desire to know reality as it truly is.
I can only write now because I’m not in survival mode. I can only acknowledge my behaviors because I was given the insight into how the mind operates. And I’m only willing to undertake this long process of dredging up the depths of my being because I want to face the truth.
Acceptance
Now comes the hard part. It’s not enough to simply say “I’m angry. I’m sad. I’m hurt. I’m lonely.” and go about your day. Emotions aren’t online terms of service contracts where we can mindlessly click a checkbox and forget about them. Our feelings have to be rightfully honored and cared for as crucial aspects of our beings. The conscious mind doesn’t get to arbitrarily decide where a feeling begins and ends.
Acceptance is really sitting with that feeling and feeling it. For suppressed and repressed emotions this will be incredibly challenging at first. The neurological wiring for processing these experiences hasn’t been formed, and until it does the body will be taxed as the mind slowly rewires itself and the heart (metaphorically) enlarges. I wish I had words to describe the beauty of this sensitive process. It’s heavy, but the heart grows in relation to the pain and there’s a great sense of relief and wholeness that comes with each phase of growth.
And then the next spurt comes. The agony and heaviness come back. But you’re a bit stronger this time. A bit more whole and willing to bear the pain. Here we have to surrender control in our minds. We can’t choose how we grow, the mind doesn’t have final say in how our experiences have touched our souls. We don’t get to choose what shape our hearts take when the healing is all said and done.
And then the feelings come again. We don’t get to choose when it’s all said and done either.
Expression
If we are willing to stay with it, the process will come to an end. The heart has deepened; new neurological wiring has formed in the body; the emotional veins have enlarged; and we’re a fuller version of ourselves. Now comes the time to reverse course from the suppression and give into to the desire for expression. The new neurological pathways have sprouted but to keep them, they must be used. We take once hidden and forbidden parts of our being and show them to the world in the creative act. Maybe we write. Maybe we sing. Maybe we dance, cook, sculpt, or whatever else the heart calls us to do. Every unique emotional experience becomes the catalyst for a unique expression. Here we clear the final hurdles of fear and complete the journey of acceptance by restoring or expanding the creative voice of the authentic self in the world.
The results of our internal emotional alchemy become crystallized and we become irreversibly known.
Reflection
Expression may be the climactic event, but we must not end the journey there. The mind now takes center stage and reflects on the whole narrative to understand the change that took place. The experience is joined to knowledge and wisdom forms. A fuller view of the self is now internalized. It is only by carrying this wisdom into the future that we are able to maintain our new patterns of behavior and avoid slipping back into repression, denial, and dissociation. As I’ve said before; there is no duality between body and mind; there are no parts of ourselves we can afford to leave behind. The mind heals and grows, and our concious awareness acknowledges a more coherent and beautiful narrative that we start to live out. We are able to expand ourselves and relate to more aspects of the shared human experience.
The pain is gone -little bits of emotional minerals and soil have been transmuted into the flowering beauty of spiritual growth.
Spirals
This is not a linear process. It spirals -up down and back around again and again. All four steps happen at once, for multiple experiences, at the same time. Sometime we go back. Sometimes we may skip forward. Some events take seconds to process -others days, months, or years. Everything has it’s own pace.
We do not have absolute control over the destination or the journey. Again, like gardeners, we don’t get a say in when the stems shoot up from the soil. We can’t decree the microsecond a leaf unfurls. We don’t determine which branches flower and bear fruit. We can only water ourselves with self-compassion and be willing to carry on as long as it takes. Because every human is made in the image of God, and each step in the process of restoring that image to it’s fullness will always be worth it.