Compass for Healing Finding Your Way from Emotional Pain to Peace

What Is the Compass? Information is power, and the Compass is a source of power that puts vital information at your service. This power can put you in charge of your life and change your life. The Compass is not intended to replace common sense, or a life and love of learning, or a spiritual ally such as prayer. Like any tool, the Compass works once you learn how to use it. It won't take you long, but it will take you a long way. The Compass will show you the right way, and it will help you leave your pain behind right away. The Compass isn't a device. It is a guide. It is a way of looking, thinking, acting and reacting. Most of us live our lives in states of reaction to an unexpected pain that came knocking at our door. But we are certainly better served if we can be proactive in finding peace. The Compass will help you send out an invitation so peace will feel welcome at your table. It will help you set a place for peace at your table, and it will help you find a way to show pain the door. The heroic dignity of life is in how we deal with the daya?to-day. No less important is our decision to find a way to make each day a day during which we leave pain further behind and bring peace another step closer. On all these issues, the Compass for Healing will help you find your way. How This Compass Came About Things don't have to be good for us to be great, and often the really good things that happen to us in life aren't seen to be positive when they happen. Good things can appear as only a passing experience, or even something painfully negative. The Compass came about because of two different experiences that I like to think crossed my path, but I may have run into them. I'd like to tell you that I knew what was going to happen when I came heart to heart with these experiences or that I was intellectually prepared for them, but I didn't, and I wasn't. The philosopher Sartre had it right: "Life is lived forwards and understood backwards." And the time in between, when we're caught looking backward at a life going forward, can be damned uncomfortable. So let me go backward for a moment and share what happened. Part one of the story goes like this: We all live on a little blue ball spinning in space at approximately one thousand miles an hour. Finding our balance is not something any of us can ever fully achieve. It is 24/7/365 work. We can find our balance at any moment and lose our balance the next. "God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road." a?Isak Dinesen In my own life, after a lifetime of writing and thinking and addressing others on finding their way, I hit a period when I found myself in the emotional high seas of a long-term marriage that was ending, and I was uncertain, to say the least, about how to find my own way with myself, my former wife and my kids. I was suffering from a very real fear of drowning in emotional pain and not knowing where to row or toward what lighthouse I should go. In the middle of those dark nights, I was clearly confused and in pain. While I thought I understood what had happeneda?the he saida?she said, you dida?you didn'ta?one of the most familiar mistakes that happens to people in pain is to confuse knowing what happened to them with getting better or being healed. Finding clarity in the past is not the same as finding the path ahead. Knowing where we were yesterday may be reassuring, but it is not necessarily a path for finding our way tomorrow. Old dialogues and old scripts could only tell me what to say and where to stand in a world that was no longer standing or, worse yet, might have led me deeper into the mess in which I found myself. My situation and my own personal history were akin to the citizens of a town hearing that a terrible flBenShea, Noah is the author of 'Compass for Healing Finding Your Way from Emotional Pain to Peace', published 2006 under ISBN 9780757305580 and ISBN 075730558X.