Holding Fire in the palm of your hand.
There’s a very old trick that I was shown a long time ago. It starts with the paper from a tea-bag. Carefully folded into a tube, it becomes a lesson in the conversion of energy; however upon reflection, it yields a lesson far deeper and more meaningful. But like all lessons, it starts with a spark, or in this case, a burning flame.
Because you are going to hold fire in the palm of your hand.
You start by molding the paper into a tube, and placing it upright into the palm of your hand. Then you light the top of the tube with a flame, and you watch as the flame descends through the tube, moving nearer and nearer to your palm.
There’s a second where you consider how it will feel if the flame touches you, and you shake for a moment, afraid of the pain that you feel is coming.
But it never reaches your hand.
Because as the fire reaches a certain point, the heat of the flame causes convection, an upward force that lifts the paper out of your hand before the heat reaches you. What once appears to be a certain experience of pain instead changes to a moment of wonder, as your fears are turned into fascination by a force that you can’t see, but can nevertheless feel.
And you realize that you were never going to get hurt, as long as you could allow the flame to leave you.
Which is where the second lesson comes in. Because in this experiment, there was only ever one way that you were going to experience pain, and that was if you held onto the paper and refused to let it go.
As long as you accepted the possibility, without holding onto it, you were going to be ok. But in life, we often hold onto things that cause us pain, when we really didn’t have to.
All we had to do was let it go, and it wouldn’t have hurt us.
Yet so many times we can’t let something go, because we have the mistaken belief that in some way, that thing defines us. So we hold onto a belief, or an action, or sometimes even a person, way longer than we ever should have done, and we suffer the pain and agony of emotionally holding fire in the palm of our hands, when we never had to.
We could just let go at any time.
So today, I would challenge you to look at something in your life that is causing you pain, and ask yourself if you are holding tightly onto something that you don’t have to?
It might seem like you don’t have a choice, but in almost every situation that I have come across in my work, there is a belief we can change, or an understanding that someone can reach, that will allow us to let go of the things which currently hurt us.
It may be scary, but letting go is often the least painful option.
While it may sting for a moment, I promise you that letting go of the things which hurt you will bring you a peace and a freedom that will surprise and astound you.
You don’t have to hold the pain a moment longer than you want to.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings