THE POWER OF THE BLESSING

From Gregg Braden’s “Secrets of the Lost Mode of Prayer”

Hurt is the Teacher, Wisdom is the Lesson

How we deal with loss and tragedy is a question that each of us will have to answer during our lifetime. Although the experience of hurt is universal, what we do with our hurt is not. If we allow the pain of life’s disappointments and losses to linger unresolved, it can destroy our health, our lives, and the very relationships that we most cherish. If, on other hand, we can find wisdom in our hurt, we can give new meaning to the most painful experiences. In doing so, we become better as people – for ourselves, for our families, and for our communities. This is the way to build a better world.

The great challenges of life appear to us when, and only when, we have everything we need to survive and heal from the experience. “God never gives us more than we can bear.” The key idea here is that you can be “tested” in life only when you’re ready. Whether or not we are conscious of this principle, no matter what life brings our way, when we find a ‘crisis’ at our doorstep, we already have everything we need to solve the problem, heal the hurt, and survive the experience.

No one is immune to the cycles of balance and change. We all have a trigger point that invites change into our lives. While we may believe that we have neatly arranged life as something that we can regulate and control, all the while each experience and every relationship is training and preparing us for something that may be beyond our control.  In doing so, we move ever closer to the moment when we’ll be given the opportunity to demonstrate our mastery over our betrayals, violated trusts, and hot-button issues. It’s only after we’ve put our last ‘spiritual tool’ in place to create the balance, however, that we signal our readiness. It’s our balance that says, “Hey! I’m ready. Bring it on!” Now we’re ready to demonstrate to the universe what we’ve learned.

There will be a time in your life when you’ll be drawn into a situation that represents your worst fears. The purpose is for us to experience and heal our own greatest fears. Because everyone’s fears are different, what looks like a frightening experience for one person, may be no big deal for someone else. For example, being left alone is the worst fear for some people, while for others being alone is the greatest joy. It’s not uncommon for someone who fears being alone to become a master at relationships in which they’ll experience their fear. When relationships end, they believe that their relationships had “failed”. In reality, their relationships were so successful that each one allowed them to see their greatest fear of being alone come to pass.

There are no accidents in life, and every obstacle we experience is part of a greater pattern. Life brings us exactly what we need, precisely when we need it. Knowingly or not, we’re always ready for whatever life may serve up.

Until we’ve learned from experience, both consciously and unconsciously, our tests may be so subtle that we don’t even recognize them as tests! It’s only when we realize what the betrayals and broken promises of our past have shown us that we gain the wisdom and skills that allow us to heal the patterns and move on in life. Once we understand why we hurt so much, the experience begins to take on new meaning.

“All life contains both joy and sorrow. We would like to concentrate on the joy and forget the sorrow, but how much more spiritually skillful it is to use everything will meet in life for the awakening.” – Buddhist teacher Lama Surya Das

Through our hurt, we’re shown our capacity to feel – the deeper the hurt, the more powerful the feelings. In our deepest feelings of pain, we discover the depth of our capacity to love. Forgiveness appears to be directly linked to our hurt as well; the greater the hurt, the greater the benefits of forgiveness. From this perspective, our hurt may be considered to be a barometer of our ability to love, rather than a punishment for the choices we make. We find our greatest healing in our power to love.

Our love is what sustains us. It carries us through the tough times, as well as the great times, and promises that we will always heal from the worst hurts that life can offer. The ancient key to allowing our love to heal us is to let it into our lives. To do so, we must find a way to change our greatest hurts into our deepest wisdom.

Turning Hurt into Wisdom

As part of a natural cycle, the experiences of “hurt” and “wisdom” appear to be closely related; they are two extremes of the same experience. They are the beginning and completion of the same cycle. Hurt comes from the way we interpret an experience; it is our initial feeling, our gut response to loss, disappointment, or the news of something that shocks our emotions; wisdom the healed expression of our hurt. We change hurt into wisdom by finding new meaning in painful experiences.

When an experience hurts so much that it’s easier to deny it, distract ourselves from it, or in some way to avoid dealing with it than it is to address it ahead on, we may easily find ourselves stuck in our feelings. Within each of us is the power to transmute our hurt into its healed form of wisdom. While the experience that originally caused the hurt remains unchanged, the way we feel about our suffering is where we find our power.

Without understanding the relationship between hurt and wisdom, our endurance of pain may seem senseless – even cruel – and continue, as the pain cycle remains open-ended. But how are we to remove ourselves from life’s hurt long enough to find the wisdom in our experiences? How are we to find refuge from our emotions -- long enough to feel something else? The key that gives new meaning to the things that hurt us is the same key that allows us to move beyond our judgments of life. It is the ancient power of blessing. When we do feel hurt, the power of blessing is a key to our healing.

Although we may believe that there are spiritual reasons for the tragedies of our world, we’re still left to find a way to make sense of them. Prayer is often the recommended antidote to ease the pain of tragedy. “Prayer may not change things for you, but it for sure changes you.” – Samuel Shoemaker

Knowing that our emotional state during prayer determines the kind of “blueprint” we create, we must find a way to clear our hurt and anger before we pray. So, in the presence of the powerful emotions of anger, frustration, jealousy, hurt, hate, and the desire for revenge, how do we suspend our negative emotions, judgments and fears, so that we may offer our prayer from this neutral state of strength and clarity, rather than from the clouded judgment that stems from hurt? How are we to pray positive prayers while we’re angry and hurt and just want our pain to stop? Blessing paves the way for us to pray from a place of strength and clarity, rather than weakness and uncertainty.

“Blessing” is the ancient secret that releases us from life’s hurt long enough to replace it with another feeling. When we bless the people or things that have hurt us, we’re temporarily suspending the cycle of pain. During the blessing a doorway opens for us to begin our healing and move on with life. The key is that for some period of time, we’re released from our hurt long enough to let something else into our hearts and minds.

Contrary to popular belief that when we bless something we put our stamp of approval on it, blessing doesn’t condone, discourage or encourage any action, circumstance or event. It doesn’t agree or disagree with any point of view. It simply acknowledges what has occurred. The act of acknowledgment without judgment is the opening that allows healing to begin.

When we see something that hurts us so badly that we need to react, shut down, or turn away, our tendency is to disregard what we feel. This is how we cope with many experiences – a shut off the emotion and hide it somewhere deep inside. But the hurt doesn’t just “go away”. It goes wherever we store it. Then, at a time when we least expect, it finds a way to reemerge.

This is especially common in people who‘ve experienced emotionally dramatic scenes ranging from battlefield conditions and rape, to childhood abuse and domestic violence. Our ability to “shut down” is the defense mechanism that allows us to go on with life, and not have to deal with the immediate pain. At the same time, the emotions that have been created within us are still there, although they’re buried. The acknowledgment of hurt is an uncomfortable yet necessary first step in healing.

For each feeling, the body creates a matching chemistry. Through the release of life-affirming hormones, such as DHEA, or life-denying hormones such as cortisol, we literally experience what we may call love-chemistry or hate-chemistry.

Intuitively, we know this to be true, because we know that joy and appreciation have a positive influence upon our bodies, making us feel energized and lighter, while anger and fear have the opposite effect. Some holistic traditions even suggest that diseases such as cancer are expressions of unresolved anger, hurt and guilt emerging from parts of the body where they were stored years earlier.

It appears that to disregard the things that hurt us may have long-term effects that aren’t in our best interests. It makes sense to find a way to transform anything that has hurt us into a new experience that helps us. We can do this by acknowledging it, and allowing it to move through the body. This is where the act of blessing enters the healing process.

Blessing allows us to redefine our feelings about something that’s hurting us now or has hurt us in the past, opening us up to healing, rather than keeping our emotions stuck and unresolved within the body.

It’s important to be very clear about what blessing is not. When we bless someone who has hurt us, clearly we aren’t suggesting that what has happened is okay or that we’d like it to happen again. Blessing doesn’t condone or make excuses for any atrocity or act of suffering. It doesn’t put a stamp of approval on a hurtful event, or suggest that we would ever choose to re-experience it.

What blessing does do is free us from our painful experiences. It acknowledges that those events, whatever they were, have occurred. When we do so, our feelings about those experiences moved through our bodies instead of getting stuck inside them. Blessing temporarily suspend our hurt long enough so that we can replace it with another feeling.

Through the act of blessing, we assume our power to release life’s deepest hurts and unresolved feelings. Blessing does so without the need to trace those feelings back to their origins, re-live the pain again and again to get to the bottom of it, or embark upon the endless search to understand why things happened in the way they did. While all of these paths may work to some degree, and for some people, the act of blessing gives us the power to change our life. And it does so in a heartbeat! When we can make our choices and offer our prayers from a place of strength and clarity, rather than from the weakness of rage and hurt, something wonderful begins to happen.

Sound too simple to work? Such a powerful tool can be as simple or as difficult and complicated as we choose to make it. Try the blessing process for yourself. Think of a person or experience that has hurt you in the past, and then apply the process. You may be surprised by the power, effectiveness, and simplicity of this ancient secret of blessing.

There is one prerequisite before you can bless, however. You must first truthfully and honestly answer the single question. The question is this: “Am I ready to move beyond an old belief that ‘someone must pay’ or ‘I need to get even’ in order to right a wrong?” In other words, are you ready to move beyond the type of thinking that justifies hurting someone because they’ve hurt you?

If you answer yes to this question, then the blessing is for you. If your answer is no, then your path is to find out why you would choose to hold on to a belief that keeps you locked into the hurt that leads to the very suffering you’re trying to heal.

While the act of blessing may appear to be in conflict with the beliefs of some traditions, it is also closely aligned with the teachings of some of the greatest spiritual masters of the past who taught the power of non-judgment, which holds the key to the greatest depth of healing. Perhaps the best known are: “Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.” “Bless them which persecute you; bless, and curse not.” As strange as these words may sound in today’s world where it’s easy to confuse justice with “getting even”, imagine how foreign this way of thinking was 2000 years ago!

“Why,” you may ask, “would I ever want to bless the very thing that have hurt me?” The answer is clear, and even deceptively simple. We have two choices regarding how we deal with life’s hurts: Either we may mask and bury them, and allow them to slowly steel from us the very thing that we cherish until they eventually destroy us, or we may accept the healing that comes from acknowledging life’s hurts and move forward.

The challenge, as well as the reward, for applying this principle in our lives may best be summed up in the words of St. Francis: “It’s easy to love God in all that is beautiful. The lesson of deeper knowledge, however, instructed me to embrace God in all things.” This means the ugly experiences as well as the beautiful ones. The choice is ours. If we choose the healing, blessing is the path.

We must acknowledge (bless) all aspects of hurtful experience: such as those who suffer, the cause of the suffering, and those who witness the outcome are left behind.

1. Blessing those who suffer: The first place to direct our blessing is toward the obvious suffering of those who are hurt.


2. Blessing whatever causes the suffering: For many people, this is the hardest part. This is where the power of the blessing becomes very real in our lives. When we can find it within ourselves to bless the people and things that hurt us, we become new. It takes a strong person to rise above the “rights” and the “wrongs” of events. The moment we open the door to a blessing in our lives, we change inside. There is a shift.


3. Blessing those who witness the suffering: This is the part of the blessing that’s so easy to overlook. In addition to those who suffer and those who cause the suffering, there are those who are left to make sense of what remains.

It is our reaction – our lingering feelings – that form the “message” we’re sending into the Mind of God following any tragedy. Ultimately, it’s how we feel as individuals as well as collectively that fills the void in consciousness following any tragedy. Bless us in our witnessing!

Keep on blessing. The more specific you are, the clearer the access you create to your body’s memory of the hurt. Repeat your blessings until you feel warmth in your body that expends outward from the pit of your stomach. As you continue, that warmth will rise and expand throughout your body.

Don’t be surprised if you find yourself welling up with tears and sobbing huge sobs. This is the way that the blessing frees your hurt and enables it to move through you. When the blessing feels complete, the world feels different. Although the reason for our hurt still exists, what has happened is that we’ve changed the way we feel about our hurt. The world doesn’t change; it’s only we who change! In our willingness to acknowledge and release whatever it is that has hurt us, the world looks different and we become stronger, healthy people. This is the power of the blessing.