I hung up the phone. I knew I had done the right thing. That I had stood up for myself. I was gentle and loving, and he had said sorry, but still I felt the hurt in my chest. I felt the pain in my heart, as if Michael had stuck a knife in, deep in, past the bone and right into the core of me. My ears heard the apology, my brain accepted the apology, but my heart, well, my heart hurt. There was no other way around it. And the hurt stayed there, for hours, days and weeks. And when the sharpness of it eventually wore off, I felt hollow inside, like a part of my heart had died, was switched off, or somehow had left me.’
We have all had experiences where we’ve been deeply hurt, and usually we understand why. We think about what happened and try to make sense of it. We may even forgive the person for hurting us, but sometimes we still feel the pain even months after the incident occurred. It’s as if we are ready to move on in our minds, but some part of us still holds on to the pain and doesn’t want to let it go. The pace of our world makes us put that part of us away so we can ‘move on’ with our lives. When we do that, we often leave part of ourselves behind, leaving us with emptiness inside. No matter how much we may want to, we cannot think our way out of this type of occurrence.
There is much more to the world than meets the eye. Humans, for example, can’t hear dog whistles but we know that dogs can. So logically we understand that sounds exist beyond our hearing range. Similarly, there are colours that our eyes are not able to see, textures so fine we cannot tell them apart and tastes that are way out of range of our taste buds. (Probably just as well!) We understand rationally that our physical body is limited and can only process information within a certain range. Therefore, logically, we can also say there is more information out there than we are able to process. To handle this we label everything, so we can categorize it, and we file it away under ‘known’ or ‘unknown’.
People are also not able to process everything that does fall into our range of perception. There’s a famous psychology experiment in which two teams pass a baseball to each other. One team wears white shirts, the other black. You have to count the number of times the white team passes the ball to each other. As you focus and concentrate on the white team, you don’t see that a man in a gorilla suit comes in, runs around the players, waves and then leaves. Because you are so focused on counting passes, your brain doesn’t notice the gorilla at all. Focused awareness. What you focus on most of the time is what you are aware of. So we actually miss out on a lot of things that are going on!
We can choose what we want to experience, and we can also fine-tune our concentration to block out what we don’t want to experience, just like shutting down that part of us that is in emotional pain. We can block unpleasant feelings or sensations, or the knowingness in ourselves that something is wrong. We learn to ignore things that don’t make sense to our brains, like the man inside the gorilla suit, or the pain in our heart that remains months after a break-up.
Sometimes though, we can’t ignore these things because they grow too big, too painful. They take over, forcing us to pay them attention. And when we do, that’s when the healing begins.