February 4, 2001

Samuel: Hello, dears.

Hello, Samuel.

S: Are you ready for this?

Yes.

S: Good. Busy, busy time right now. Have you noticed? Not? There’s one person in here who’s not having a really busy time. I think you all should probably come sit next to him and get some of that energy rubbed off on you. Wouldn’t you like a bit of that?

And although on a physical level, it may be accurate for you that it does not seem that things are so push-and-shove and hurry-and-do, I will tell you that on your mental, and certainly on your spiritual, level that’s exactly what you’re feeling.

On an emotional level, you have that sense of push, because that’s the energy that’s coming through right now, and that’s how it works. The more sensitive you are to what you have come here to do—or perhaps another way of thinking of it is, the closer you are to what you have come here to do—which is, after all, what makes you sensitive—the closer you are to what you have come here to do, the more intense you feel about everything you do. And that makes tonight’s topic especially needful, because with regard to the energy of this month, and all of the mass consciousness surrounding the holiday of this month, I’m going to be talking about pain [Laughter]

Well, don’t you think that’s fitting? You thought it was going to be something else did you? I’m going to be talking about pain because I’m going to be talking about relationships. I’m going to be talking about being in love. And that does mean I’m going to be talking about pain, and the place pain has in your life—why it is so good for you that you just cannot quite let it go. Ways, perhaps, to avoid some of that pain.

The first thing that I want you to remember about pain, before I go too far into it, is for you to remember that everybody’s tolerance of it is different. Just as Suzie could hit her hand with a hammer and be hopping around and wimping about it for a week, Mary would hit herself with the very same amount of strength, and just say, “Ouch!” and let it go. Right? All right, maybe not.

But do you understand what I’m saying there about the same thing for different people has a different effect? Aye. What you are able to tolerate, and what the person next to you is able to tolerate has nothing to do with any kind of judgment you cannot put on it, such as, “It was not a big deal.” Such as, “What a wimp!”

What you are experiencing is the only reality. However, a whole lot of times in your reality, you act on automatic, automatic pilot. Right? All right. You act on automatic, and you are judging your experience not by what happened, but by what has happened in the past like it, and what you think happened at that moment. And sometimes it’s just not accurate. Can anybody give me any sort of example of that sort of thing?

Have you ever had something that happened to you, that impacted you, that when you look back on it was not really what impacted you. Perhaps what you had as experience was something where you were having a conversation with somebody, and you are sure that you said nothing to set them off, but when they play back the words to you, you recognize those words. You, sure enough, did say them, but there was none of the intent to wound that went with it. It was not your experience of it, because you were coming from another place altogether. Have you ever had that happen?

Over and over.

S: It’s not a good sign. Not a good sign. How about an experience, perhaps, in which you took part in a movie, a film, or you visited a friend’s house, and your experience of it was not the same as some of the others there.

Any of you ever been in a car accident? And in that car accident what you thought happened, what the witnesses thought happened, and what the other driver thought happened created three totally different stories. That you were or were not at fault had nothing to do with what you felt about the whole thing, did it? That you got smashed up against the wheel, does not hurt any less because it’s their fault, does it?

Our experiences are very relative. It’s why you cannot judge another’s. But you fail in relationships—oops, there it comes!—you bring pain into your life because of your misjudgment of the situation and of others.

I’ll say that again: The pain you bring into your life, the difficulty that you have with relationships, be they with a lover or why you don’t have one, be they with family, be they with friends, be they with co-workers—who sometimes are not friends so, I cannot quite put them in that same pile—the reason that you have relationships that go sour with them has to do with judgment. And if you think it’s not your judgment, it’s theirs, that becomes your judgment that makes it wrong.

Pain. Everybody experiences it differently. Your reality of it has a lot to do with the coloration, your judgment of whether that’s a large pain or a small pain. You’ve had experiences in your life in which you were busy, you had a lot to do, and therefore that twisted ankle you could not give attention to and you just kept going. And other situations in which you have twisted that ankle the same amount, but you spent days hobbling around and nursing it. It had nothing to do with the ankle and everything to do with where you were in regard to pain, what you were doing in regard to judgment at that time.

Now, there are a lot of medical people in the audience, so tell me—not a difficult question; you probably can go with what comes right off the top—what’s pain good for?

Let’s you know something’s wrong.

S: Awareness. Let’s you know something’s wrong.

A protection mechanism.

S: There it is. It is a protection mechanism. Somebody explain that for me.

When you feel pain, you’re going to be aware of it, and you’re going to avoid those things that cause the pain to either start or become greater.

S: Good. Good. Say it again. It’s really good.

Okay. Pain is the body’s way of letting us know that there’s something wrong, and so we will usually … it’s to let us know that there’s something wrong and that we need to avoid those things that will cause it to hurt more or the things that caused it in the beginning.

S: All right. That’s all I need to say tonight. It’s done. Do you get it?

No.

S: Put it through your filters for a moment. Let that sink in, because right now, at this time in your world, change out of chaos is causing a fear of loss that is resulting in pain for you. Chaos. Good or bad?

Neutral.

S: Neutral is the answer. Chaos is neutral! Samuel, just a moment. When I was a child and my mum said that I was the creator of all chaos, she was not thinking that was a neutral statement. And yet chaos is—if you allow yourself to think it through a little further back, chaos is simply unorganized possibility, isn’t it? What organizes it?

Our choices.

S: Your choices. Sure. Out of chaos comes change, and in your life you have been experiencing change. And if I were to ask each one of you, very much like smacking you over the hand with a hammer and going through the room and saying, How has the change been for you and for you and for you?” you would all register it differently, but it’s all the same energy.

In your life you have been experiencing change and as is very often the case, that change has resulted in a sense of loss. Why is that? Any ideas? Change brings loss. How so?

We have to give up the old patterns that are in our lives in order to come to a place of acceptance with that.

S: And that’s taking it just a bit of a step further by putting a spiritual, helpful slant on it. And yes, that’s very accurate. It’s because change means this goes to this, whatever it happens to be, and you sense loss when you move from this one to this one.

If you thought this was a good thing, and your choices for change make you feel that you’ve had control over it—big key there—you feel that it’s something good—judgment there—that you’re moving to, then it’s a good change. You like it. And the loss is a good loss. You have in your life those losses. Whew, glad to be rid of that.

But if it’s something that you’ve become very comfortable with, and what you’re moving to is unknown, then you might say, I’m not so sure that it’s a good loss.

And in your lives, the nature of the human experience is that what you are comfortable with, even when it is destructive, what you are comfortable with, even when it brings you pain, what you are comfortable with you will want to stay with, rather than risk the unknown. And that’s the sort of experience that when you look back on it, you say, Should have done differently. Could have done this instead. And you start filling up that bag that you carry around on your back everywhere that you go that you put down so seldom that every time you do you think, Whoa my life has just changed drastically! When all you did was put down just for ten seconds that huge baggage you carry around from all of those things you should have done, but did not, those times you should have been honest, but were not, those times you could have loved but did not. It is easier to stay with the known that makes you miserable than to risk the unknown.

And whenever one of you tells me that, I always say back to you, “What if the unknown is good? What if it makes you happy? Or do you think that to date the results of your choices that make you happy are good enough that you can pretty well guarantee you should not change, because this one’s going to be worse than what you’ve already up over and over and over?

All right, back to where we were going. So, loss—any time there is change there is a part of you that experiences loss. I do not have what I did. It made me miserable. I don’t care. It’s a loss. Loss equals pain. And depending upon what’s going on with you at the moment, it’s pain that you say, “Yes, but it’s a good loss,” or it’s pain that you nurture, that you tend to, so that you can keep feeling it and bring it up at a moment’s notice. Pain that you can then start laying on those around you, that you can build a beautiful shield with, carefully, memory by memory.

[. . .], like it. Go ahead, prop that right up there. [. . .], but sort of smells a little bit the same, but not anything like it anywhere else. All right, but put it over to the side, but add that to the wall, too, so that everything that comes out of you goes through that wall of fear of loss. And take score. “I knew that. It’s always this way. Here we go again. Why can’t I ever?”

You have a lot of very interesting depictions of life all around you. You call it television and movies. And so I want you to imagine a situation in which the hero or the heroine is in an extremely intense situation having to use every ounce of strength that they’ve got, calling on every fiber of awareness. And they need to go a step further than they think they’ve got in them to do it. They are weary. Too weary to continue. What do they do?

Sometimes what they do is pull out their trusty knife and slice themselves [makes motion as if slicing wrist], because the pain keeps them going. It’s real. The adrenaline that pushes through the body from that hurt, they can use, channel it to keep flowing.

That’s a rather outrageous sort of reaction, and of course it takes television and movies to come up with it, but there’s a point in there. Can you follow it? What’s a point I’m making in there about you being able to keep going? Sure.

It says we require drama. That’s the adrenaline that gives our life meaning and focus.

S: Let me come back to that one, and do hold on to it, because I do want to go there.

We retain and continue to play the same script.

S: That too. How about this one? Pain has a place in your process. You can use it to your advantage or you can be used by it to help you fail.

Often it takes pain for us to learn.

S: Way too often, because you have found that the point that I was just making, that pain can be your friend, becomes a way of life. And the way that it becomes a way of life is because you have found success in Steven’s directive. Say it again now.

That far too often we need drama to give our life meaning and focus.

S: Right. In your relationships, you have this little thing that bothers you. You just hate it when somebody does this. Now you have a choice there. You can just ignore it or you can start doing something about it.

Now, let’s see, what could this be? You never put your shoes away. You never put your shoes away and I trip over them all of the time, and it’s really frustrating. Will you please put your shoes away?

Now, that’s a real simple little one, right? And I will admit, for some of you putting the shoes away is not the issue; it’s more like putting all of the family finances away or putting your own health away. But for most individuals, you ruin your relationships not on the big things, which more often than not cause you to pull together. You lose your relationship on the little things. You don’t put your shoes away where you have a choice. Whether you are aware of it or not—and the pain comes because you choose not to be aware of it—whether you are aware of it or not, what happens in your process is you make a judgment: What is it worth to me that those shoes get put away—because you are going to do the most natural thing that happens in every relationship that you have: negotiate behavior. Because when I say to you, “Will you please put your shoes away,” and those shoes are not put away, you are going to make a judgment about what that means.

That’s where pain comes in, because sometimes your decision about what that means is not right. Oh, don’t you hate it when that happens? Because what’s really going on in the mind of your partner is, I thought they were put away, because they were stuck up against the wall instead of right out in the middle. And that’s a big change, that’s a big help. I helped you. And I helped you because I love you. And what you see is, the shoes are not put away. And I asked and you did not do it, and what that means is you don’t respect me. What that means is then you don’t love me. And you bring pain into your life with that decision.

And you made that decision, because somewhere in your process, you learned that action is the result of drama. And you have—here I go again saying this for the three hundred and fiftieth time—and you have traded drama for life. You think it’s passion, but it’s only drama, an excuse, a simulacrum, for living.

And you have done that because you are motivated by pain. [To member of audience.] Just a moment. How can you stop that? Will you please put your shoes away? The next day the shoes are still sitting out right there next to the wall. What action could you take rather than judge, blame, dramatize, pain? What could you do?

Kick them across the room.

S: Just kick them across the room. Not yet. Not yet. Someone who’s not answered one yet. Any ideas in there? Aye.

Well, for one thing it sounds to me like the negotiation needs to be more specific, because it was just ”Put them away,” and there’s two different definitions of what “away” meant in that situation.

S: So maybe one of the first things one could do is consider that perhaps you were not functioning with the same definition system. Rather than automatically presuming the worst, presuming the best would be saying, “Clearly, what I consider put away and what my partner considers put away are two different things.” Discuss the definition. Presume the best, not the worst. Sure.

You also need to be ready to renegotiate, because once the definitions change …

S: That’s moving into where Lillibeth was going. Do you want to go there?

So after you get the definition straightened out as to what’s “put away’ for you and what’s “put away” for your partner, then you have to negotiate how you’re going to achieve that to be a win-win situation for both of you.

S: Right.

And it may be that the shoes are not always where you want them to be, and maybe it’s not always where they want them to be, but maybe you can arrange it for some sort of compromise.

S: If you want a positive resolution, and that’s the key there, you know. You’ve got to want a positive resolution.

Maybe the first thing that you need to do is back off a bit, and ask yourself, Is it worth it? Now a lot of you lovely, spiritual people, working on your haloes, like to say, It’s not worth it. I don’t want this argument. Except what you’re really doing is saying, I don’t have the time or the inclination or enough faults out of history to pull together and present in order that I can win this one, and it’s not worth it.

Or what you’re saying is, It’s not worth it because it’s not going to be enough fun, and it’s not going to give me enough adrenaline, and I’m not going to gain what I’m looking for out of it and so I won’t bother. Or, it’s not worth it, and on and on the list goes, not because you are seeking resolution, but because you are seeking to be right.

In any relationship, you bring pain into your life when the need to be right is bigger than the need to be together. And some of you even take that piece of information and can twist it around to your uses so that you never have to change, and you can keep the same patterns going on and on and on, because you can say that what Samuel says is, you should care more about being together, and that means we have to work this out all the way down to the tiniest jot. And that’s not what I’m saying.

You bring pain into your life because you do not seek resolution. You seek your point being made, and you seek that because it’s a judgment on you that maybe nobody but you has. But you have the standard, and even though you don’t always live up to it, by gum, everyone around you shall.

The pain is there to tell you something’s wrong. It may be that what’s wrong is you. It may be that what’s wrong is you. Admit it and be through with it. Admit it and be through with it.

If there are consequences from a karmic history of abuse and misuse, clean it up and be through with it, because you will bring pain into your life until you do.

All right, where were we going there? That was a relationship in which you had this argument, the shoes were not put away, you had to look first and say, Do I even want an argument about this. Is it enough? Maybe it’s just a definition going on here. Let’s clarify what this is about. Do that. And at that point you then can move forward. What’s this about? Is it about defending my definition of what “put away” is or is there something else going on here. That one question, if you can honestly answer it before you act in your life, will have huge possibilities of getting rid of pain for you. Huge ones.

Why does this matter to you? Why does this matter to me? It’s just shoes here. Why does it matter to me? What’s this fight about? What’s behind it? I can tell you, you’ll find a fear. And ultimately, I can promise you, that fear is about you. Not that other person. It is about your fear of loss.

And to take that one step further, to explain a bit about what it is you’re losing, it’s your fear of loss because you fear you will not have a replacement. I will lose you and never … I will be alone from there on in, the rest of my life. I will lose this money and never be able to earn more again for the rest of my life. I will lose this authority and never have power again for the rest of my life. It’s that drama stuff, isn’t it, because your fear of loss is a dramatic activity. And remember what I said about drama: You do that one in exchange for living, which is to say, when you are able to recognize a fear of loss, you can look at the exchange you’ve made to maintain that fear and make it all right in your eyes, so that you can maintain that fear safely. You do that, you know. And four people on that side of the room said, Yes, I do know. And you think I was not talking to you as well.

Your fear of loss is because you don’t trust love. Hello, are we finally working back around to Valentine? You fear loss, because you do not trust love, and you do not trust what you do not know.

Now, Bonnie, there’s your bumper sticker for the night, because there’s about five years of therapy and about ten years of spiritual teaching in it. You do not trust what you do not know.

Got it.

S: You say that now. Right. So there is chaos and there is a choice before you, but to make that choice, you fear the choice because it might mean losing what has been, and you do not know what will be, and although what has been may not have been pleasant, it may have been wonderful. You believe that by releasing the one, it means it’s gone, you’ll never have it again. And whatever the other might be, it might not be as good or as bad, because where the bad has served you, you nurture it and keep it, and you bring it up every now and again and you look at it. Oh, wasn’t that a rotten experience in my childhood. Oh, boy that’s good one! That affects me so many ways in my life here right now, I’m going to keep that one. I’m going to hold onto it, and whenever I’m fearing loss, I’m going to pull it back and remind myself. Oh, polish it up. Here is why I am a failure. Aye. Here is why I know I do not deserve more. Good for you.

You laugh because you relate. It’s sad, I know, it is. And it’s hilarious, isn’t it? To step back for a moment and say, “I guess it does sort of look like that, doesn’t it?” can help you move away from its importance to you so that it becomes a memory, rather than an excuse. So that it becomes a pain that reminds you how much you’ve come through, how far you’ve come, how strong you are, and reminding you to be careful, rather than one that reminds you how debilitated you are.

So, there we are, back again, having got one circle taken care of here in which you have this situation in front of you, it looks like chaos, you are afraid of the loss, you are aware that the loss means that you are not putting love into the situation. Hmm, sounds like last month, don’t you think, in that you are making a judgment, and that it’s based on allowing yourself to keep what you think you need to keep going. If it is a very difficult thing, then it becomes a drama, because you’ve got to have a lot invested in it to keep it going, to keep it hidden until you need to bring it up. And to justify it when you do bring it up, because you are not good enough, allowed to have, powerful enough, strong enough—any other excuse you need for the moment.

You think you’re avoiding pain. What you’ve done is befriend it. You’ve made it a useful part of your life. You’ve made it the means by which you go from here to here. You forgot to ask yourself the question, when faced with the choice. What was the question? I said it earlier. Ask yourself what?

What does it matter to me?

S: Yes.

What skin off my teeth is it?

S: Exactly. A very strange thought that, but yes.

Where I come from, that’s an old saying.

S: Sounds rather cannibalistic, don’t you think?

What?

S: Rather cannibalistic, don’t you think? Peel the skin off your teeth. All right.

What does this matter to me? If it’s about love, that’s where your actions will go, toward that which is the most loving thing. Anything else, it’s not about love. And I mean anything else.

Aye, well, Samuel, that’s what I always say. I am doing this because I love myself. And therefore, I must trumple you.

Trumple?

S: Trample. That’s the word. Trample you. Trumple seemed right. At any given moment, your choice is love or pain. At any given moment, you are living the results of that choice—love or pain—and in any situation, you can ask yourself, what is the loving and what is the painful thing? And you will get an answer.

But Samuel, I am just such a wimp at heart, and any time I ask myself what is the loving thing, it’s always something that disempowers me and allows the bad person to win.

You have fancy words for that. You have fancy words to justify your own version of that thinking, but you have that thinking. Samuel, when I asked what is the loving thing to do, it’s always the thing that lets the other person win. All right. Is there a problem here? Well, they’ll just run all over me, because once … because thirty other times. And how was it you handled it? I fought for what was right. And I guess they did too. And you moved it from love to a dog fight. My territory. My power!

Pain. Pain. Pain is there to let you know healing is needed here. Pain is there to activate wholeness. That’s what healing is, you know. It is the energy of wholeness being used in its best possible way for that given moment. It’s the energy of wholeness.

And when you say, What is the loving thing? that’s the energy of wholeness. Which is to say, where there is pain, it’s telling you love is needed here. And your world would be a vastly different place, and because there are about thirty of you already sending the thought to me that you’re thinking your world as in the whole planet, and what I mean is your world as in your tiny universe—the one in which you are the great and marvelous central sun from which all action come and goes—your world would be a vastly different place if, when you asked yourself what am I really seeking here, the answer was unequivocally—I’m impressed, you never know when it’s going to pop out straight—without a doubt, love, wholeness, healing. You’re in the presence of the most imbecilic mechanic you have ever dealt with who is telling you in no uncertain terms that you owe them massive amounts of dollars to pay for their stupidity. Told you it was drama. And you ask what is the loving thing? You see, you’re afraid that what you’re going to get, that the right thing to do, that what you do is going to disempower you and make you lose.

But, you know, the answer might be listen with a straight face, because in that moment, that’s what needed. And in the next moment, you have another choice, what will it be? Listen.

When you spend your life avoiding pain, you draw to you what you are energizing. Primary physics. So when you spend all of your time running from, focused on, getting it out, avoiding, denying, when you spend so very much of your life, fearful of pain, then into your life, I promise you, will come all sorts of things that bring you great pain that you might come to that point that you realize pain isn’t such a bad thing. You live through it, you keep going. That what last year was the end of life as you know it, this year is just all right, keep going.

Pain is what you have when you don’t choose love. In every relationship that you have, the ones you have had, the ones you hope to have, the ones you have right now, in every relationship that you have, where it is flowing beautifully, be it business or pleasure, where it is flowing beautifully, it is because love was worth it to you. And where it is not flowing, it is because the drama of pain is your exchange to keep the you as you know it, avoid change and live without love. A strong and terrible thing to say, I know. I don’t know how you’ve been able to live through it so long.

Do not let pain serve you in this way. Choose love. Choose love. It changes chaos. It becomes possibility and hope, rather than confusion and drama.

Glochanumora.

Thank you, Samuel.

S: Thank you.