Pain As Your Spirit Guide - Episode 35

We recently had an intuitive session with our friend, Energy Medicine Practitioner, Intuitive and Reiki Master, Elizabeth Furest, and within our conversation, we started talking about what Elizabeth aptly called “The Pain Teacher” or as we ended up calling it, “Pain as your Spirit Guide.”

The three of us have learned a lot from this tough teacher, and we have a feeling you have too. How has "The Pain Teacher" or "Spirit Guide" showed up in your life and what can you do with these lessons? You may change your whole perspective on pain after hearing this podcast!

If you'd like to work with Elizabeth check out elizabethfurest.com. You can also follow her on Instagram @SolitaryConnection

MENTIONED ON THIS PODCAST
Paul Chek of The Chek Institute

PREVIOUS EPISODES OF "SEEKING CENTER" WITH ELIZABETH FUREST
How to Stay on Your Soul's Path
Seeking Center Season 1, Episode 33

Releasing Fear + Stepping Into the Unknown
Seeking Center Season 1, Episode 34

Visit theseekingcenter.com for more from Robyn + Karen, plus mega inspo -- and the best wellness + spiritual practitioners, products and experiences on the planet!

You can also follow Seeking Center on Instagram @theseekingcenter

Transcript

Robyn: I'm Robyn Miller Brecker, 

Karen: and I'm Karen Loenser. Welcome to seeking center. The podcast,

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Robyn: Oh, we're diving in today. Karen and I were recently having an intuitive session with our friend, Energy Medicine practitioner, Intuitive and Reiki Master, Elizabeth Furest and within our conversation, we started discussing what Elizabeth aptly called the pain teacher, or [00:01:00] as we ended up calling it pain as your spirit. Let's just say that the three of us have learned a lot from this tough guide, and we have a feeling you have as well. What do we mean? How has the pain teacher or pain as a spirit guide showed up in your life and what can you do with these lessons? Let's get going. Hi, 

Elizabeth: Elizabeth. Elizabeth. Hi Robin. Hi Karen. Thank you so much. So happy to see you as always, so happy to see you both. 

Robyn: Let's just dive right what do we mean when we talk about the pain teacher? 

Elizabeth: Yeah, that's a great question. honestly I didn't coin The term I actually came from Paul Chek, if you're familiar with his work.

And, when I heard it, it just resonated because I believe that we have a lot of different teachers in life. We have our teachers, when we study in academia, we have our teachers as our parents. We learn from our friends in all different forms. But pain is one of the main energetic components that I've looked at, and it's what we do with it when we have pain that comes in that really can decide whether or not we heal pain in a way, its own ascended, master to come in and teach us how to move through things that [00:02:00] are physical, emotional, mental, pre-birth, that are in our relationships, et cetera. It hits across the board. And things 

Karen: that we might be taking from our past lives into our current lives that we may not even be aware 

of.

So Let's start and talk about emotional pain versus physical pain and how do we differentiate what an emotional painful experience can teach us versus maybe a physical one? 

Elizabeth: Yeah. I think when we're dealing, with emotional pain, whether it's something that we're consciously aware of or not, it could be, the feelings of abandonment. It could be a feeling of sadness, it could be embarrassment.

there's a whole spectrum of emotions. But what happens is the energy, the emotion that we're feeling, it radiates through our entire body. So it pour through the limbic system, it runs through the central nervous system, and you have your brain triggering off information that then sends signals throughout the rest of your body where it might manifest as a migraine.

It might manifest as a stomach ache respiratory issues, hyperventilating not feeling safe. So emotional pain can, stem from various different experiences [00:03:00] or relationships, et cetera. But it can also be things like if we didn't feel emotionally supported as children, and we don't necessarily remember it, but we can carry emotional pain into our adulthood.

But the good news is that we learn from the pain teacher is that we have the ability to work with pain. and have a relationship with pain and how we approach it. If we don't avoid it, we actually have the opportunity to learn from it and then rewire. So then when a painful experience wants to reoccur, we don't have that same cascade within our bodies or our emotional fields.

We can roll through it a little bit more quickly sometimes. 

Robyn: And also before we continue on, before we even got on this call today, we were talking about the varying levels of pain and how some people come in and there tends to be something that happens and they end up having chronic pain, or they're going through a health crisis of some sort and the pain is almost overbearing. , how do [00:04:00] we integrate that into this conversation when we're talking about how, as you were just saying, there are certain emotions that can then take over and become physical symptoms. How do we then talk about these other levels of pain?

Elizabeth: I look at them in kind of totality, so I think a lot of times when we go get treated for pain, we're getting treated for the symptom and not necessarily the psychosomatic piece of it. And so a lot of times what I've seen working with people is let's look at something like perhaps the pain that comes from a long term disorder where the bones might become frail, the digestive system, could be messed up But the emotional pain is the control over the body or the psychological piece of needing more self-worth or self-care, et cetera. In that case, if someone is just getting treatment to have more nutrients in their body, they're not targeting the deeper, the psychosomatic piece of what do they need to feel safe in their body or to feel confident or to rewire their mind so emotionally they have a good relationship with food.

So when we target emotional things, I think that comes from being able [00:05:00] to acknowledge where it originates from and then how to target that piece. Either going back to that experience or starting to do brain techniques through meditation and even breath work to start moving out where that pain is stored in the body.

So the chronic pain cannot continue. that's a 

really 

Karen: good point. I think if it's a chronic illness where the result of that pain or the cause of that pain is really clear, at least from a physical perspective, there's always the opportunity to try to dig a little deeper to see where or how or what impact your emotions have on that.

And if there an emotional route in there that you can pull out to alleviate some of the pain that's there, so how can we do that? Especially if you're immersed in something that is a chronic illness, for example cancer, you have been given a diagnosis, 

Elizabeth: How 

Karen: can someone potentially get their power back over letting that illness control them versus them having a little bit more of that control over 

Elizabeth: that pain? That's a really good question. I think with when [00:06:00] people receive diagnoses and there's unquestionable amounts of pain both physically and emotionally it goes back to keeping our frequencies high and from an energetic standpoint and how we handle it mentally.

So because we know by law that energy follows thought, I would say in a case like that, it's starting to watch the beliefs and the thought forms of retraining the mind of, I will get through this. My body can heal itself using the visualizations of running higher frequencies, bringing more light into the body because 

Robyn: dis ease 

Elizabeth: is the inability to have ease within the central nervous system and the limbic system and things like that.

And so by bringing in more light, you create more illumination in the body. And if it's paired with a belief, And staying at a higher frequency of I can get through this. I'm stronger than whatever this thing is that will start to change the relationship with the emotions and then the physical body will follow.

Some of the most positive people I have ever worked with and witnessed are those in tremendous amounts of pain, but they [00:07:00] have worked so diligently mentally to be in a place of gratitude and to also feel stronger than whatever it is they're battling, that they're able to get through their treatment and come out on the other side, or just have a different perspective on life because of using those tools.

I really 

Robyn: love what you just said, and I'm hoping that those who are going through something right now, Can hear that, because I do feel like when you're going through it and you're in the pain, and you may not have heard this perspective before, at first you're gonna be like, Shut the fuck up, because I'm in pain.

But if they pause, let that out of their system as you just said, you have and continue to work with people who are in that state , they're not letting that pain. To your point, Karen overtake their entire lives.

They are taking their power back because that is what we are left with in those times. We have that choice. We have a choice in every moment. and it, and it becomes, Part of the [00:08:00] lesson in whatever that is that we're going through, I would imagine. 

Elizabeth: Yeah. I think it can be on a bigger level, If we have a physical injury, if I ride my bike, and this is a true story, if I ride my bike up too steep of a hill and I tip over cause I'm going too slow cause I don't have the momentum and I get banged up from it, I'm not gonna ride up that same hill, We learn from the pain I learned from falling off the bike.

But in a case of when someone gets a diagnosis and there really wasn't anything that they were expecting to get that it's a more challenging but often a bigger opportunity to heal because we might learn something else about our boundaries or about how we wanna treat our bodies or how we wanna live our lives and what's most important to us.

So it can play out in a myriad of ways. 

Robyn: I just really quickly wanted to bring up, just because we have covered L Gray's story on our podcast in various episodes, and Elle was someone who suffered from something called complex regional pain syndrome, and we were talking a little bit about l and the pain that [00:09:00] she endured, which was really quite unbearable.

And one of the things that I was saying is, I think people who have read her story or have listened to the podcast might ask why would this child have been given this diagnosis? She started feeling that pain when she was 12 until the time she was 15 when her mom says she took her life back at that point.

And I thought, Elizabeth, what you were saying was actually quite helpful. It doesn't take away from the actual pain that she did endure, which was horrific in any anybody. Who's listening, who has complex regional pain syndrome or knows someone that does. 

 Marker redo "I'm so sorry" 

Robyn: I'm so sorry because I do know from Vanessa L's, mom how horrible it was.

But I thought your point in looking at it from a different perspective in that, and I'll let you share that cuz I thought that would be helpful for those listening right now. 

Elizabeth: Yeah, and I think because a lot of my work tends to be what I call big picture healing. It's not just looking at the isolated pain and saying, Oh, why is this person enduring this?

And looking for those [00:10:00] answers, on a limited level, but knowing that their soul signed up in some contract to come into this lifetime to experience her diagnosis, to experience that level of pain. And like you were saying, Robin, which I didn't know how. What's great about her story is that she intuited, she used her own wisdom at a very young age to self diagnose herself.

That's the wisdom that our spirit has. So I have so much compassion for the amount of pain she went through. And on a spiritual level, the higher lesson of that pain or the work of the pain teacher was to show her and maybe others around her, or partially that she was intuitive at a young age. She could self diagnose.

She went through a journey and still had the power of choice. What an incredible story. And then to be able to have that story and leave that as her mark on the world and what an impact. We're talking about her right now. it's just gonna keep going and inspiring other people. And so that's also a great example of the pain teacher.

It's not that the pain teacher was there to punish her or try to get her to master something. It's How [00:11:00] to dance with that pain to create a bigger picture healing for herself and for others. Oh, that's gonna be so helpful to 

Karen: so many people because I think that is a question that comes in so often is why would that happen to someone?

How could somebody even from a soul level choose to? And I think what you just reminded us is that there's so much we don't even know on this earthly plane. We can look at it and I love the way you served up that experience and looked at it from a spiritual level, but I'm sure there's even more that we don't even understand.

Elizabeth: It's so multi and it's so complex. And I mean I think a lot of us, I would say across the board, most people would say that they would avoid pain at costs. But it's there for a reason. Because it's the opportunity for growth. It's always the opportunity for growth. it can help us shift our attitudes.

it's meant to have us live more authentically. Absolutely. Have you ever been sick and had the feeling like, Oh my gosh, this is gonna be my new reality. It's never gonna go away. And then you're so grateful that yes, , and you could breathe. You're like, [00:12:00] I forgot. Got it. So yes. How nice it was to breathe through my nose.

 That's the pain teacher. 

Karen: It's also a little bit of ego too, isn't it? That likes to creep in when a diagnosis or pain in any kind comes our way, It's like the why me, why this happened to me. It's all of those kind of self-serving questions versus, and I love what you said about looking for that higher frequency in the experience, 

I can't remember who said this, but I think there's like these thresholds of emotion and the whole idea of anger being a higher threshold of emotion than depression or, giving up altogether.

It does give you that power to be able to know that there is control that you have, just even if it's a, your choice of what you choose to believe about it and how much control that you give it over your 

Elizabeth: life experience. Absolutely. And that's a lot of David Hawkins work in letting go when he talks about the spectrum of emotions and if we choose to live in fear, you're gonna generate things in your body, maybe ulcers or you're gonna generate things that, because that fear is stuck in the body, it's gonna [00:13:00] manifest in a physical way.

But if you take that fear and look at it and say, Look, let's say it's social anxiety and it's building up in your head, and then you get a stomach ae and then you decide not to go out. If you can look at that piece and say, This isn't serving me and I'm gonna choose to bump up my frequency out of fear, into that threshold of courage.

And you tip the scales and you're like, All right, I have social anxiety, but I'm gonna go out with this group anyway. And you end up having a good time. You feel socially accepted, you're not gonna get stomach ulcers or your propensity to get 'em is not going to be there. So when we choose energetically and mentally, it absolutely shifts what our experience is.

Robyn: I actually think that is gonna help so many people because using that example of social anxiety, there are so many people suffering from that of all ages. And so as adults, if we can think about it, and then as adults who may have children for our children who may have that, helping them turn it around to that courage and helping them.

Use language I'm gonna up my frequency and I'm going to turn it into courage. And [00:14:00] then most of the time you do end up having a good time. . Or you realize 

Elizabeth: that everyone else you're meeting with also has social anxiety and you bond over it and you create group healing, collective healing.

Yes, very much we've all been there. There's no separation. And when it comes to pain, and we've all had some level of great physical or emotional pain in our lives, and definitely some people more than others, but some of the most incredible people that I am inspired by and have the most incredible stories are the ones who have gotten through some of the most painful things.

Just tremendous amount of loss or abandonment or abuse. And it's what they've done with it and how they choose to live. I know it's cliche to sound, We all have choices, but we really do every day with how we are going to approach it. Are we gonna focus on the physical pain in our body or are we gonna go outside and get some fresh air and focus on the sunlight and the ability to still walk and breathe I'm gonna 

Robyn: share this one very quick story, which reminds me, which I totally forgot about till this moment, which is when I was in Sedona several [00:15:00] months ago, and I had started on this seven hour hike, and in the first hour I sat on a cactus, okay? . Okay. And my left butt cheek as well as my left hand, had all of the needles in it.

And. My husband did as a good, a job as he could do, getting them out. But there were definitely a couple left in there. And that we were with, who's also been on our podcast, Jim, he actually said to me, You can focus on the pain or you can choose to not focus on the pain and continue on.

Look where you are amidst, these incredible vortexes in Sedona. And he was right. And in that moment, I made that choice and I went on for the next, six hours and I did have to come home that night. Really iced my butt and get those. But my point is that's such a little, and it's like innocuous.

It's not that big a deal, [00:16:00] it's 

Elizabeth: big deal. 

Karen: I interrupt here because what you just said just dawned on me that is such a great example because the reason we started even talking about this was my Achilles heel issue. But Robin, what you just said.

And we can talk about that in a second, but you just made me realize is that you are in a spiritual experience, And we talk a lot about how there's this dark and light, right? And the more that you're trying to go towards the light and be 

Elizabeth: your best 

Karen: self, the dark can come in and in my case, nip at your heels, which is my Achilles issue.

But I could see in your case when you had this opportunity , right? Like of course 

Robyn: still right. And it was at the beginning too, before I was gonna actually experience all and I really did have many very deep spiritual experiences specifically that day while I was there.

And you're right that it does come to that dark and light. Let's talk about your Achilles, cuz that actually is how this whole conversation really started. Yeah, 

Karen: And I hope it's a good example for other people to hear [00:17:00] because it is that opportunity to look at a bodily symptom that kind of can come outta nowhere and take a minute and try to figure out the root of where that.

Pain was coming from, or what that pain is trying to teach you and get you to pay attention to. And for me, I've talked a lot about how much I love to run. It's been my kryptonite every single day I go out there and I do my meditation and I love to be outside, physically outside in the air.

And just very recently since coming home from my parents' 60th anniversary, so there's a lot of family emotion that went into that experience. But taking that very typical lap that I've always taken around my neighborhood and all of a sudden getting this really terrible pain in my left heel. And I've never ever had an issue, This is since I've been 20 years old.

So of course I talked to Robin about it and I'm like, I know there's got to be an emotional attachment to this pain because There's no reason why it should be hurting. So that's why obviously I called Elizabeth cause I knew that she intuitively could not only go in and see what was going on, but give me some sense of the [00:18:00] why.

And it was such that the symbology that came out of our conversation was so dead on because what you were able to tell me was a number of things. But first of all, the Achilles heel is, your foundation of your structure, of your body. Your left side is your masculine side, the side that is trying to do things.

And this whole thing of me loving this experience of it being my meditation every day was a perfect opportunity for that light and darkness to come. And literally the darkness nipping at my heels. And you also pointed out that the time we talked was really at the very pivotal time of the Equinox, when.

The days were half dark and half light. So from a timing perspective, as Robin and I even get closer to this launch of this big network that we wanna create, they saw my light, and they went for my strength. They went for the place that they knew would get me the most. And so this visualization that you gave me of looking like Achilles's, literally being in that, golden [00:19:00] Armor and just shushing them away, not from a mean, angry perspective, but just being like, No, I'm too big for this.

I'm faster than you and I'm stronger than you. It empowered me. And that's what we were talking about before is how do you take the control back. So even though you do have the pain and have to nurture it knowing what the root of 

that, the symbol of it gave me so much more power over, over that injury.

So that's what this conversation started. Absolutely. 

Elizabeth: And with physical injury we know that we can speed it up when we choose not to be angry with it and not combat it, because then the energy doesn't really wanna stick around. It's okay, there's not really much for us to do here, like to just keep building pain and you're not reacting to it.

It's gonna go find something else that excites it more. So when you can look at it and say, You know what? This isn't really gonna work for me. You can shift outta that pain faster. And that's where people choose to heal. It's what we do to it. If we fall victim to it, if we give it that control, it will certainly decide to post up in your ankle.

But if you look at it and say, You don't really belong here. It doesn't working, it'll start to dissipate 

Karen: and the [00:20:00] symbol I think another thing that you mentioned to me too, so my back was hurting, never had a back issue. And you're like, it looks like you have a little backpack on you that you're carrying around.

And so the point is so interesting to be able to do this sort of self-evaluation and when you are getting what seems like very random pain or very strange physical issue, to just take a moment. Louise Hay was great at, she created a whole book around these things of, what does that source of pain, what is it really trying to tell you?

Robyn: Yeah, her book Heal Your Life. Karen and I have it on the ready right near us all the time. So at our daily calls, if something comes up we look it up and we're like, Oh my God. Of course it is. Yes, that is what it is. So it's just understanding it. And I know to your point too, Elizabeth, trying to not give it too much attention.

There's also, I know for me last year I ended up having a much bigger physical issue with a fibroid in my uterus. And leading up to that, for years, I [00:21:00] had issues with really terrible periods that were both painful and heavy. And I tried to grin and bear it ,

that's what we're taught to do, get through. And honestly it ended up really impeding my life at some points because I couldn't leave the house because, it was that bad that I couldn't leave.

And my point in saying all this is that, I ignored it to almost too much. I was trying to deal with it too much and what I feel in that sense, I could have taken care of it and myself if I had really insisted on getting certain.

Test done prior to when it got to the point where I knew something was just wrong. And then it was a bigger process to deal with the issue. But I just wanna bring that up too you have to also pay attention. You 

Elizabeth: definitely have to pay attention to what it's saying.

And I think when we combat it or avoid it, it does just get bigger. So like in your case, there was an avoidance of it, maybe a disbelief, maybe just not wanting to look at it, wanting to do other things. So then it had the [00:22:00] time to grow and get settled in. And yeah and that's how it works too.

It'll get bigger and stronger if we ignore it because the lesson has to come through. Yeah. And I 

Robyn: think in that case too, what I wanna bring up is, , there was a deeper issue at the root from a spiritual, energetic, soul level, , that I really needed to address.

And so it was then growing and showing up bigger and bolder and literally became a boulder in my body. And if you look at 

Elizabeth: it symbolically, it's okay, a fibroid, is a growth in your uterus. And it's like that part of your body, if we look at it from spiritual anatomy, it's your ability to create, it's the womb area.

And so there's a growth or an energetic block or an emotional block that maybe you feel like you can't create, you can't produce on some level and so if you're feeling that on any level, and it's also the emotional chakra of our body and it's responsible for our processing emotions and it's our gut feeling and it's also can be our one-on-one relationships.

So if any of that has a block in it and you're not addressing what has to [00:23:00] be healed around it, it's gonna grow and grow until there you are medically having a procedure to say, Okay, what was this all about? What do I have 

Robyn: to do differently? Exactly. Exactly. And I was really fortunate because you, along with some other spiritual practitioners and healers, really helped me on that level to understand what I needed to release on an energetic level so that then when I physically had it removed, I really felt reset in life, 

Elizabeth: and now you're an expert on the topic, right? You've gone through it. If someone else came to you, you could probably with confidence advise some tools for them to help them move through either the pain or what the tactical things that they need to do to seek care. So you've got more wisdom Yes. To spread more healing.

Yes. 

Robyn: We've all had different types of pain in life, but we've all been talking recently and these different issues have come up over the last couple of years, and you recently had a tick bite that was something you had to 

Elizabeth: deal with. Yeah, that was absolutely a pain teacher for me.

That was a big moment. And so [00:24:00] the tick bite did fully manifest into Lyme. It manifested into a brain infection and Bell's palsy. And what's also interesting from an emotional standpoint is I got the tick bite after I had taken space and time. From seeing a recent X. And and I knew that the relationship had run its course, I knew that in my soul.

But there's still that ego part of me, the human part of me that's let me just go for a hike with him anyway. Let's just go see if anything comes up. And that's when I got the tick bite because Spirit was trying to show me as the pain teacher, This is not the direction you're meant to go.

You're not supposed to see this person. This is a toxic relationship. It's a parasitic relationship. And then the tick bite happened, which confirmed to me that it was a parasitic relationship. And if I had any denial after that, it just kept manifesting in ways that I was forced to heal myself through having a brain infection and through going through lung treatment and the rehabilitation of the gut and resetting all of my energy systems.

Because I don't think if it was so extreme for me that I would've gotten the lesson Avoid toxic relationships. [00:25:00] Don't be around parasitic people. So that's what I took. The big picture healing was, that was my biggest lesson from that was to get out of repeating in relationships that were draining to me.

Karen: When you were talking , all I could think of is how little we give credence to our emotions. They're so easy just to squish down and into our subconscious even we forget about them and how our body doesn't let us forget.

Our body will continue to try to give us, or situations, our spirit will try to give us opportunities to learn the lesson that we really came here to learn. And so your story is just such a great example 

Robyn: of that. Yeah and we were even talking in our episode from last week, which was actually about body work and cranial sacral therapy.

I feel it's no coincidence that we're having this conversation today, so much of it stemmed from trauma in the body. And Jenny was saying when she starts her sessions, she's feeling into where is the trauma in the body, she even talks about the fact [00:26:00] that there's trauma in childbirth, , there's trauma in even coming through that canal. There's trauma there that you may not even realize you have, so it can go all the way back from coming into this world, which I thought was also fascinating because it wasn't really something that I had thought about before.

Elizabeth: Oh, yeah. being born is very traumatic, Children, the umbilical cords wrapped around their neck. Some kids of birth into water. Some are birthed. Rooms under fluorescent lights. You might be birthed in a room with other like loud noises. Who knows?

we've been birthing all animals since the beginning of time, but we don't necessarily remember, but our bodies on a cellular level and our memory banks are holding that information. Just like a kid who might have been given up for adoption or something, they might not remember any of it, but they're carrying in an abandonment wound.

There's psychic wounds. And that's where trauma can stem for. That's why body work is so important, because these practitioners can find layers in the body that maybe the person doesn't even know is stored there? Cause it's so deeply 

Robyn: embedded. 

Elizabeth: The 

Karen: other thing I think for you, Elizabeth, in your [00:27:00] story people listening should hear too is these painful teaching moments can often be the threshold or the bridge to really remembering while we're here and really putting us on our path, if we have the openness to look at it that way.

And sometimes the more trauma and drama around that experience is the thing that wakes us up into finding 

Elizabeth: our path. Is that true for you? Absolutely. I knew in my situation with getting the lyme that it wasn't just going to be about getting the wisdom around autoimmunity to help other people or because you have to go off dairy, gluten, and sugar, all that to not only get a total reset in a lot of other ways in the physical realm.

I knew that it was about, it shifted so much in what I knew was possible for myself and Spirit moved a path and created a path for me when I wasn't necessarily gonna do it on my own. So the pain teacher came in through that manifestation and now I can look at it and say I was totally redirected for something that wasn't for me into something that was, and I guess all these other things came with it [00:28:00] that I got to learn along the way and other things that really sucked along the way.

But ultimately, I can say in this moment that it was a catalyst for a much more expansive life and so much more information. And so it's truly all what we do with it. It really is. And 

Robyn: to your point earlier, you were talking about social anxiety, but all of it really ends up show showing you how much courage and strength that you have.

you're willing to face it, if you're willing to face it and walk through it. I feel like that's one of the major lessons the pain teacher is teaching. 

Elizabeth: And when we shift into courage, there's more light in our bodies. So that darkness that's trying to hold us, grab us by the legs and hold us in those darker frequencies of pain, a fear of anxiety.

When we switch into courage, there's so much more light coming in that the darkness doesn't have as much of a hold. So when we choose courage and strength, even through the pain, or even through the uncertainty or the unknowing or whatever, more light comes in.

So there's less dis disease in the body because that mal illumination is clearing. 

Robyn: Oh, I hope everybody [00:29:00] listening , is visualizing that. And so any time you start to feel pain. 

Elizabeth: Use that. Even just bring in 

Robyn: light. Bring in light And Use the word courage.

It could be an unlocking for you of the light. visualizing that in your body is huge. Or 

Elizabeth: I've seen people start to get overwhelmed in the place of social anxiety where they might get the closing down feeling or they might feel that a aura feeling. Some people get that or migraines start to come on.

And if you pulse it with light and start to move it out because you choose to be stronger than whatever the pain is coming in, you can manipulate it out and then take your control back over it and say, Okay, this was a bunch of information coming at me, but I don't have to choose to respond that way and I'm just gonna use light to gently push it out.

And you retrain the brain and then the cascades of emotions that follow. , you're no longer phased by it. You get used to it cuz you've retrained the brain. So the emotional response isn't gonna take you into a total place of fear or despair or anxiety. You're gonna look at it and say, Oh, I've done this a million times.

I might have a little social anxiety but I can get through it. Cuz that courage is the thing that's pushing you [00:30:00] forward. The courage is the momentum. 

Karen: One of the exercises I love in those situations too, is seeing people can almost step out of your body and not be you for a minute and look at that.

Soul, that person and play out the movie of how you would love it to go. In other words, if this were a heroin in the movie or a hero, how would I love to see this story play out? And then what kind of story do I wanna be able to tell as a result of me facing this experience? And again it's reaching again for that power and courage that you said before.

And it just gives yourself an opportunity to stand above it and even stand out of it, even for just a moment. And realize, again, you have the choice to decide how you want this to play out. And you do have control over that situation. 

Elizabeth: Yeah, and I think that's the law of being present, when we're present with our pain, we can understand it, we can see what it's necessarily tied to. And there's wisdom there. And so when we take a moment and present time to look at pain, That's where we are operating from a place [00:31:00] of our own power are you going to keep in that pattern where the pain's gonna keep playing out? Or are you gonna say, This is no longer serving me, I'm gonna choose a different path. And so an emotional pain. When I've seen people that maybe stay in the same cycles of something like codependency as soon as they take that moment to be present and say, You know what?

This really is painful and it's not working. I'm gonna do something else or, I'm gonna break this, or I'm gonna choose a different path. When they do that, the healing starts happening immediately, and then eventually through the work of courage, they're in a different place and they'll look back and say, Wow, I will never repeat that again.

I will never choose to be codependent, I will value myself more than that. And that's the pain teacher coming in and moving us along our path. It's there to help us evolve, even though in the moment our human side thinks, it sucks cuz it hurts. That's why we run from it.

But it's inevitable. So it's better to face it and do the work around it. And so 

Robyn: how do we identify and figure out where that root comes from and Heal the pain. 

Elizabeth: that's a great question. It's you know how we self heal [00:32:00] and I think that's why we are all here. We all came to. The Earth's school to learn how to heal ourselves and to heal each other.

And in my practice of energy medicine, working on myself and working on others, you can go quiet and either sense within your body and just find what feels darker or heavier or energy is not able to reach. If you have joint pain when you scan your body, you might see, Oh, my knees feel heavier or darker or grayer or my wrists.

The other thing you can do if you're not just sensing into your body or if that feels confusing in front of you, you can pull up a picture of yourself energetically, like a blueprint or sitting across from a friend and you can use your hands and just. Scan what feels there's less energy running through.

And that can usually pinpoint either the physical location in their body. Just like when a kid has a stomach ache, they hold their stomach and they curl down. They're identifying already where they have pain or they can point to it. Even people who are sometimes coming in, moving through [00:33:00] recovery in a hospital, they have the pain charts, they can still identify where in the body, what level of pain.

So we all are equipped with that. But from an energetic standpoint, it's being able to scan yourself or someone else and then when you find the spot that feels dense or heavier, sometimes it's can be just as important to not look at what it is and create a story and say, Oh, what's the emotional piece?

What happened as a child? Instead, just pull it out and say, Okay. This is a big boulder or like a money spot in you, you just don't need it. And you just move it away. You can imagine it's, you're putting into a body of water, burning it off into a fire, and then replacing in their body more light. So anytime we move energy out, we wanna replace it.

So old energy don't come back in when you replace it with more light. I've seen people be in a lot of physical pain and I've asked them to scan their body, take out all the gunk, push it aside, burn it off, and then just call in white light or gold and start filling themselves up so that pain can barely come back in because the pain won't be an energetic patch for how much light is coming into the body.

[00:34:00] And for me, growing up as a highly sensitive child, my pain wasn't necessarily physical, but it would be emotional. So if my feelings got hurt or I remember one time getting in trouble for something I didn't do, but I took it on as if I had done it because I was that sensitive.

And so then it would make my body believe that it was true. And I had to get to a point of being like, That's not true, or they didn't mean it that way, or, this doesn't need to hurt my feelings. And now, as an adult with these tools, push it down, move it out, replace myself with more energy.

So if someone went to hurt me, I'd just be like, whatever, Because it won't come into the field anymore. I've rewired myself to not have a response to it. And so that's really important with emotional healing too. I saw this the other day, a guy on crutches and he had one broken foot.

He had a boot on the own and he was walking and his boot was the foot walking and his other foot was up in the air. I'm like, You're not even walking properly. The boot should be up. He was in a big group of people. He didn't even realize who's walking on the broken foot, he's not in his mind focusing on the pain.

He was focusing on. He's with his friends, he's hanging outside, and [00:35:00] if it's just in the healing process and he wasn't in that much physical pain, it goes to show that he was creating a different experience then focusing on the boot on his foot. That 

Robyn: is such a good example.

Elizabeth: and it goes all ways too, when kids fake being sick and they become sick. It goes both ways. 

Robyn: Yes. You're so right.

Elizabeth: And stress is a major part. Stress is the number one thing that makes us mostly sick because we're not designed to be bombarded with that level of excitement or overuse of our energy we can feel totally fine, but if we have a buildup of a big event or a big thing, sometimes the day after, you just have that total crash.

And it's not that your body's physically sick, but you're trying to process all the energy that you had to push through yourself to be a conduit of. Whatever it is you were doing. And so when we can clear stress fast or take these mental health days or personal days to ground or be in nature or get away from technology, that is the healing too.

Robyn: I think a lot of people go through heartbreaks. Is there something for those who are going through some sort of heartbreak that you could advise them [00:36:00] to do specifically?

. Yeah. 

Elizabeth: Heartbreak cause I would say no one gets out of this lifetime without it. It's just part of the human experience. But what I do trust is it allows us to grow deeper in love. It allows us to grow deeper in love with ourselves and. To have the capacity and learn lessons and get tools to love more deeply when we move through life and to cherish people.

I think we've all been there. We've all had things not go the way we expected or been rejected in some capacity or had great loss. And that, I would say that is one of the most non-linear healings I've ever seen, where it can take a long time. For some people they can heal really quickly and other people it can take years and years.

And it's all about having the self love and the compassion to know that your heart does heal. There's other forms of love and support. The more that we love outwardly to people and animals and nature just around us, the more we get it back. And when we have that kind of loss, even though it may not be that person can be replaced, but it doesn't mean we won't love again, and that is.

The incredible [00:37:00] perseverance of the human spirit. I've seen people become widowed and lose their partner but fall in love with their dog two years later. And it's a different kind of love, but it will open that pathway to the next partner because they're in love sitting at a dog park one day enjoying the moment.

And it's gonna create those different pathways. Cuz when we choose love and we choose heart center things, we can't help but to attract it back. So as long as there's still the capacity to stay open and loving, it doesn't matter if the thing you love is, your garden outside still will bring in love in all different forms.

And so to heal heartbreak, you have to continue loving. And it's really hard. Cause when you're in it, you think you're the only person in the whole world that's ever gonna have, and that no one will ever understand. Yeah. And that's right when you open up a little bit, even if it's 10 or 20%, you might make a new friend, fall in love with learning, fall in love with nature.

There's so many things. It's so easy 

Karen: in those situations to wanna really 

Elizabeth: shut down and not 

Karen: wanna be open and to shut the light out completely [00:38:00] because of that pain. And what I love what you just said, it just reminds us that as difficult in any situation of heartbreak like that, there's always a glimmer of an opportunity to learn.

Elizabeth: Always gotta always choose love. love is the highest healing frequency. If we go back to David Hawking's work, I think fear is the bottom of the barrel. And I think unconditional love is the highest. And if we can keep choosing love, Even if you can't choose love, but you can be like, Oh, that's cool.

I don't love it. I like it. Keep reaching for that feeling cuz it's gonna get you closer and closer to love. 

Karen: I love rounding out this conversation that way. I mean it's such a full circle of starting with a pain teacher and ending up with love and light 

Robyn: Hopefully everyone listening, really sees now how pain is a teacher and how ultimately it comes back full circle to love, which is will fill you with light. 

Elizabeth: And that's why I wonder too, maybe it's pointing it as like pain as a spirit guide cuz I thought about this of like, how do we not take, Paul Chek is so well known and there's people who study at the Chek Institute [00:39:00] and things like that.

And like I love that he calls it the pain teacher. But it's like when I look at it, it's like Arch Angel, Michael does his stuff. Pain is its own ascended master. It's his own spirit guide. And so that's an easier, I don't know how to coin it, but if that's an easier way to understand it of okay, crap.

Yeah, when I fell off my bike down the hill, it's okay, like it's just me hanging out with my spirit guide pain who's showing me not to do that again. If we can look at it in a lightness too, and not oh, and then I fell off my bike. Ah, and not pick up like the drama and just get the lesson.

We can get up and keep moving. And that's like the resiliency that, especially that we see in kids, Have you ever seen a kid fall? And you can't tell if they're gonna cry or not cuz they're deciding cuz they may not be in pain, but the reaction is to cry cuz then you get your mom and all this stuff and if the mom comes in and is You're okay, you got this.

And they don't cry, it's cuz it pivoted really quickly cuz the pain didn't, it didn't integrate yet. And I think that all the time , is this kid gonna cry? Like when they're learning to walk and they plop down, it's like they have the choice pain or no.

And when you pick em up and you're like, you're fine, you get 'em right back going again. 

Robyn: That is a great point 

Elizabeth: pain. 

Karen: Pain is a spirit guide. I [00:40:00] think there's something to that. I really 

Robyn: do. Yeah, 

Karen: it can stop the pain almost in its tracks if you know that this is showing up to teach you something, 

Elizabeth: Yeah. I mean 

Karen: It's like the minute it's there, it's oh, what is there to teach 

Elizabeth: right now? And you can get really good at catching it fast. So I don't know if I'd call it pain, but I have this really uncomfortable sensation anytime of dropping, which I think is common for people, like rides at Disney World, roller coaster car rides down hills.

I get this visceral feeling, like that I'm falling off a cliff and I've hated it, but now, because I'm so used to it or know when it's gonna happen I can set myself up to go down that hill or whatever and it doesn't even get to me because knew it was gonna happen and I changed.

, I'm riding there with my spirit guide pain. We just decided that this isn't gonna do that anymore. 

Robyn: Wow. I think that is a great practice to get into. Cause I really think it's a practice of really looking at pain as 

Elizabeth: that spirit guide. Yeah. Or think about people who do cold plunges people go into really freezing cold water. They can focus on the risk of hypothermia, which is real and how cold they really are. Or they're focusing on how good they feel and how [00:41:00] clear when they get out.

Because it's such a great energetic reset for all the systems on cellular level that people feel awesome after. So it's what we do with it. 

It's like we're just gonna call it pain is a spirit guide. Yes. I love that. 

this has been talked about, I think since the beginning of time, To. What we go through to push other frontiers. Do we think, that people who truly, I was thinking about this yesterday in Northern California.

I'm like the people that originally got to some of these places up in these mountains, they tracked, through rugged terrain, through snow, through hot, up mountains, through valleys, pain as their spirit guide because they're keeping their eye on the prize and it doesn't mean they're not hungry and cold and you have broken bones or have viruses, et cetera.

But that pain is what is partially the thing that's keeping them going. And pain keeps us moving cause we don't wanna sit in it either. or 

Karen: give it the power. 

Robyn: there's so much in here. This was so good. If you wanna listen to more from Elizabeth.

She's been on our podcast several times, so we'll have the links to those specific episodes in our show notes. And if you [00:42:00] want to work with Elizabeth, which we highly recommend, you can visit her website@elizabethfurst.com. That's E L I Z A B E T H F U R E S t.com. You can also follow her on Instagram at Solitary Connection. We love you, Elizabeth, so much, and we're so grateful for our connection. Thank you so much. So 

Elizabeth: much. 

Robyn: Thank you.