How to Heal Your Emotional Pain
To heal your suffering, you must surrender to it.
On the 5th day of a 9-day silent meditation retreat, I woke up at 2 am filled with terror. Flashing through my mind, on a nonstop high-speed loop, were the scariest scenes of all the supernatural films that I had seen as a kid: The Amityville Horror, The Exorcist, The Omen, Poltergeist, Salem’s Lot. Demons, ghosts, vampires, and other kinds of malevolent entities, and a ton of creepy music, were cascading through my brain, along with the most intense fear I’ve ever felt in my life.
These films had given me all sorts of nightmares as a child, and I remember watching the films while peaking through a blanket over my head during the most terrifying scenes. As an adult, though, I didn’t walk around consciously afraid, as if the mere mention of one of them might send me into a panic.
But apparently a lot of fear from those movies was still accompanying me. And after several days of quieting my mind, that fear erupted into consciousness. I was panic-stricken, my heart was racing, and I was breathing in greedy gulps of air. Sweat gushed from every pore, soaking my clothes.
Each time my mind scrolled through the images, and my body squeezed out another bucket of sweat, the fear diminished a bit.
