About two years ago I met someone who acted as a catalyst to a spiritual awakening. They were part of a series of intense experiences that have changed my perspective and pushed me to change my life. Below, I recount one of those experiences and the impact it had on me and my thinking.

One weekend after I had spent some time around this catalyst person, I was on the long drive home. It had been a charged weekend, and I felt wild with energy. While driving, I would suddenly feel this intense pain hit me in my chest. It wasn’t an excruciating pain that I wanted to stop. It was what I have come to call exquisite pain. It caused me to cry as it hit, wave after wave, gradually easing in frequency and intensity over a couple of days.

As it eased off, I received a bizarre early morning phone call, at 2:46 am. It was from a clearly inebriated man, with a voice I did not recognise. There were three phone numbers associated with the call; two he said (slurred), and there was the number my phone registered of the call itself. When I tried to call the numbers the next day only one of them connected, answered by a confused woman with small children noises in the background. Suffice to say I still do not know who this man was or how he had my number. He initially spoke snippets that related to a loved one who had passed many years prior.

Among the man’s later garbled speech was the phrase “it’s a fine line between pleasure and pain, fine fine fine’’. Indeed, my friendly inebriated man. I had been experiencing this pain since engaging with the catalyst person I referenced above. The pain I had felt with it, however, turned out to be a mere inkling in regards to the exquisite pain it is possible to experience. The greatest such pain I have felt was on the day I felt what I can only conceive as a direct line to the centre of the Mystical Forces of the Universe. Source. The Great Spirit. What many call the Divine, or God.

This happened on one of my nature walks during which I often spend time in deep contemplation. I was doing as usual; walking and thinking, seeking to understand one thing or other through my own felt experiences. On this day I found myself going straight to the top. Like a flash in my mind’s eye I had this sense of seeing through space, my view moving at an incredible speed, through layers of ‘reality’, to a single point. THE point. I felt a thread that exists from me all the way to the Source of creation. While I speak as though I saw it, really I more so felt it, though it left me with an impression of a pattern or a structure to the layers I moved through.

This came with a massive hit to the chest again, so intense that it doubled me over for a few seconds. Fortunately there was no one around as I stood drawing deep breaths facing the earth. It passed, and I walked my way home, holding this concept that I’d perceived and trying to find sense of it.

This fine line between pleasure and pain recalled to me of once hearing that in our life course we learn much through suffering. Then we may reach a certain stage in our personal evolution where we learn through love. Hearing this at the time sounded like a pleasant way to learn and one that I felt eager for. What I understand now is a pivotal difference between little ‘l’ love, or ego-level love, and big ‘L’ Love, or unconditional, soul-level Love. Big ‘L’ Love brings pain of its own, except it is a pain of healing rather than a pain of being hurt. Through it we are called to face our internal wounds until we can connect to the core of who we are. In the often quite immense pain of healing, there is a quiet current of pleasure, or release, and a joy that comes through as more of us is freed.

I knew at the time this feeling first happened that it was associated with Love. It was an immense Love I felt at the time for my catalyst connection. It was unmistakably located in the energy centre of my heart space, or heart chakra. I felt this as my strongest link to the voice of my soul self; the place in which I can most strongly feel the existence of the true Self beyond the human self. The heart space can hold a Knowing that the mind can’t match on its own. At least not in the logical left side where we most often direct our focus.

As I started writing this current article, I was inspired to instead direct my efforts to write this blog, so I can refer to it here. With the kind of energy I experienced with the catalyst and on that day, I believe it could easily have been overwhelming to my mind’s grip on reality. I have wondered could that experience have driven me into a psychotic state had I not been prepared through my navigation of previous life experiences. Would I have been able to have had the experience had my heart not been prepared through the catalyst?

What it showed to me was a bigger purpose to shadow work, of inner exploration and integration, of facing and feeling our hurts and not turning away or suppressing them. It showed me the importance of learning engagement through the heart space. In working on ourselves, and being open to facing unpleasant truths or painful realisations, we are opening ourselves to the possibility of life- and perspective-changing experiences. There are experiences on the other side of hard internal work that we cannot access prior; and that we may not be ready for without having first passed through the fire.

It is common to be afraid of pain or reluctant to feel it. Or afraid of what we will find if we look too deeply within ourselves. Perhaps we have even forgotten how to go within ourselves. Our modern world calls us constantly to stay focused on the external, and that keeps us out of practice. There is ultimately one thing on the other side of those inner hurts that we may fear to touch. The truth of our own hearts, our deepest self, waiting to be seen and welcomed home.

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