Embracing Beauty and Pain

One of the lessons in my astrological chart is to embody my highest self in this lifetime. To do that, I have learned to embrace not just my philosophical and spiritual side, but the essential thing has been to learn to embrace and reconcile the pain and struggle of this life and all the other lifetimes. It is a trick that I think everyone bumps into in moments of a normal life.
How do we balance our physical nature … and how we engage with this reality … with our divine natures?
I remember being a child as we annually drove from Dallas Texas to Colorado for our vacation, marveling at the profound beauty of nature and then seeing dead animals that had been hit on the road.
Seeing them, I felt a profound sense of pain for those poor creatures just trying to survive in a human made world … that was often oblivious to the hardships of nature.
That realization would make me cry for years.
I think that was the moment when I began this journey to figure out how to reconcile the extreme duality of this life.
My spiritual self was highly advanced for my age, and I do not remember a time when I did not have a profound sense of God, the universe, or something Divine. I could see angels, guides, and the dead all around. Yet, everything was connected in a dance or attraction, beauty, love, passion, and power.
I lived with the reality that in my own home was the profound emotional immaturity of my mother who had been so terribly emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually abused by her own parents. My mother had probably one of the most severe anxiety disorders I have ever seen in this life. She would rage, collapse, get depressed and suicidal, then get very anxious and was unable to cope with any forms of change.
She could be very loving to those who would let her have her way.
Even then I recognized that she existed in a bubble that was made from conditional love.
So, while I knew myself to be a walking embodiment of a powerful divine force running through me, I was living in a home filled and overflowing with dysfunction, chaos, upset, and turmoil.
As I grew up and learned more about astrological charts and their meanings, I could see that this set up was perfect for me to understand and learn about this duality. My home was the perfect environment to be constantly confronted with that duality.
It was no small wonder that I would be attracted to an artform that required one to be the illusion of beauty, softness, grace, determination, and drive, while dealing with the tremendous amounts of pain and suffering that it would require, from point shoes to extreme flexibility, and to athletic feats that defied logic or ability.
Ballet allowed me to not just observe the duality but to become and embody that duality.
I began to slowly realize that to become great required one to embrace the challenges that greatness required. Ballet required me to hone the body, mind, spirit, and soul to work together as one. I learned the illusions of beauty and grace come at a high cost.
Many dancers learned sacrifice as a way of life.
We were sacrificing our health often for thinness. To achieve that specific level and look of thinness, some smoked, some were bulimic or anorexic, and some struggled with emotional issues and insecurities. Many had all three issues that arose at various times.
Dancing is tough and dancers are a determined and committed bunch. But I also learned that finding that blend between the divine grace of spirit and the powerful suffering of being in this world’s duality creates a type of grace that is unmatched and something that is very special.
One learns to surrender to the forces of the universe. Whether one likes it or not. We learn that fighting against those forces will ultimately destroy either your body, emotions, mind, or spirit.
While skill requires effort and sacrifice. Performances require a type of surrender to make the magic that becomes a ballet. That is where the pain and beauty can become transcended into something else.
While I have to remember that the universe has my back and that it has never allowed me to really fall through the cracks, there are moments still that the universe asked (yet again) for me to surrender up what I consider precious in order to discover that I am truly safe.
I believe everyone experiences a crisis of faith or a feeling of being disconnected from the powerful forces of God or the universal consciousness. I believe that often I feel so deeply that I do not just feel the power of my own subconscious wounds but that I also feel the collected suffering of this world and the plight of humanity at this time.
Ballet allowed me to learn skills so that I would not feel completely overwhelmed by the suffering of the world.
I have learned many tools and spiritual techniques of various cultures and philosophies, and they have each shown various and diverse paths, perspectives, and traditions to transcend pain and suffering.
I have learned that through such processes I reclaim my sense of purpose and that purpose becomes the fuel to allow me to see both the personal and the universal as one.
We are all here to learn to embrace the full spectrum of the human condition and experience. We are here to learn to balance, beauty and pain, without losing ourselves in either. This teaches us that great strength has at its root … powerful vulnerability.
It is through these processes of healing ourselves that we can develop a true, deep, and abiding compassionate understanding of the interconnectedness of life.
This is how each person can become a beacon of hope and wisdom for all those that they encounter as they move through the darkness and light of this world.
~Suzanne Wagner~