Many life lessons come with pain. The pain is what gets us motivated to learn the lesson but is not the focus of what we’re supposed to learn. But sometimes when we have to relearn a lesson multiple times, we choose to hold onto the pain as a reminder because we never want to do that again. We wrap the lesson in layers of emotion, because at the core of that bundle lies a distrust in ourselves. We already had to learn that truth more than once, so it must be a weak spot and we need to armor up against ourselves repeating the mistake.

We end up creating all these little bundles of pain. Over time they can proliferate to such a degree that we are unable to move in any direction. We feel helpless because the one person we need to trust in the world is ourselves, and we’ve decided that we aren’t trustworthy. The lessons are overshadowed by the pain. We avoid the pain. We don’t know if we learned the lesson. Repeat.

This is chosen pain. We’ve chosen to attach this group of emotions to a moment in time, an idea, a behavior, or a choice that we came to decide was a problem. Chosen pain can be abandoned. If we begin to trust ourselves we can choose to disintegrate those bundles of pain. As we grow and move on in life, our weak points heal and change. We are not condemned to carry our past failures into the future.

Acknowledging our patterns can help bridge the gap between what we do that we don’t want to keep doing and recognizing when we’ve learned the lesson and changed the pattern. Everyone has something. I had a pattern of choosing unhealthy relationships. As with most people, I didn’t design it and I didn’t understand it. It came from family. My response after some really awful experiences was to wrap any type of emotional vulnerability, outside of those aspects which I felt safe with, up nice and tight in barbed wire and cactus. I didn’t trust myself. But as I learned to trust myself in other aspects of my life, I realized that I could trust myself across the board. I am not the same person I was back then. I could let go of the pain that I chose. Full moons are a convenient time to let things go that no longer serve us.