I was reading my daily devotional this morning, and today’s subject is Spiritual Warriors. Spiritual warriors are those that have had their hearts broken: by break-ups, death, illness, disappointments, failures, expectations of others, and so on. Spiritual warriors have had their hearts broken and have lived through the pain of a broken heart.
We are all spiritual warriors. We have all suffered through the pain of heartbreak. It is what happens in this school called Earth. Some say it is our purpose for incarnating on Earth. For me, I say that we are all spiritual beings having a human experience. We cannot experience heartbreak and pain on the Other Side, and so we come to Earth to experience it.
But why do we want to experience pain and heartbreak? It seems so silly that we would leave a Heavenly place and choose to come here, where we are guaranteed pain and heartbreak.
Perhaps the best way to explore this question of why, is to examine HOW we deal with our pain and heartbreak. There are at least three ways of dealing with our pain and heartbreak. The first option is to not deal with it; to pretend it doesn’t exist. This is the least healthy way to handle pain. It leads to depression, dis-eases of the body, and will surely lead to an early death. Stuffing our pain really is not an option.
The second way we deal with pain is to compare it to our high expectations. In the example of a break-up, we compare our pain to the best days of the relationship. In the example of a death, we compare our pain to the great joy our loved one gave us. In the example of an illness, we compare our pain to our healthiest time of our life. In these comparisons, we feel the pain even more intensely. Because the standard is so high, it feels like we can never be out of pain again.
The healthiest way for us to deal with our pain is to be in it, see it for what it is, Bless it, and keep living our life. Recognizing that the pain is with us, but WE are not the pain, recognizing that we can live our life to the fullest, even though we have this pain, makes us warriors, spiritual warriors.
An example from my own life revolves around illness. Back in 2008, I was diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis. As I started researching colitis, each finding made me more and more scared about the diagnosis. It increases my chance of colon cancer. It can flare up from time to time, with the flare ups lasting anywhere from a couple months to a couple years. During the flare ups, most foods irritate the colon, and so there is weight loss. And the constant trips to the bathroom really are debilitating. You don’t want to go out or be too far from a bathroom at any given time. It can be very scary.
There was a time, during my third flare up in the spring of 2011, that I asked myself, is this how I will die? Am I slowly dying from colitis? Having confronted this question, I knew that I needed an attitude adjustment. I went from comparing my illness to better days, to living with my illness but not letting it define who I am. I am Jill Sand, not Jill Sand with colitis. It’s hard to describe, but when we choose not to be defined by our pain, we are set free to enjoy life. We learn to live in the moment. To be present at this time.
Being present, not being defined by our pain; that is what makes us spiritual warriors. We come to this Earth to have a human experience. A human experience is defined by the pain of a broken heart. HOW we work through that pain determines if we have done the work we came to do, here on Earth.