Today’s sermon is from the Fundamentals of Unicult. It’s on suffering. The standard experience on earth is suffering has been normalized as something that is constant and enduring this understanding of suffering only perpetuates suffering and does nothing for the enlightenment of anyone and here we have a bolded sentence that says inevitable hardship exists to show us that suffering is a choice and this is one of those things that I personally came up with and then was like can I say that suffering is a choice and it’s something that I really dug to understand from that perspective and today we’re going to be talking not just about the idea of suffering as a choice but the purpose of suffering and the purpose of pain and we’re also going to be talking about the power of forgiveness and these things are all intertwined

When you suffer basically in Unicult we distinguish two different aspects of pain we distinguish the pain of something happening to you valid pain that is when something terrible happens to you if you lose something that you care about or you get put into a position that’s bad or you get hurt or anything like that then your pain is valid there’s nothing wrong with experiencing pain obviously life is very painful sometimes but then we distinguish the difference between that initial pain and also suffering is the idea of prolonged pain suffering is the idea of holding on to that pain and when I have depression I held on to my pain and it created a lot of suffering it created depression in me and the reason why it did is because I didn’t have a potential direction to go I followed my cynicism on the Unocal path to joy we start out with cynicism and that gets transferred into hopefulness but I didn’t have that knowledge then

I just had the cynicism and when you follow cynicism to its final conclusion everything sucks everything is broken everything is you know designed to be painful then you end up in a position where you are completely disempowered and you’re just cycling on this cyclical cynical suffering spiral say it three times fast cyclical cynical suffering spiral

That spiral will create suffering because you’re just sitting there and you don’t know which direction to take your energy in and unfortunately when we follow a negative path when we follow that downward spiral it brings us to the bottom and then there’s nothing to do at the bottom except hurt except to prolong our suffering in Unicult we say that suffering is a choice and it’s up to us to wrangle our energy to wrangle our thoughts to take responsibility for our consciousness and to start to follow a hopeful spiral upward and it doesn’t mean that the things that happen to you weren’t bad it doesn’t mean that you didn’t have a right to feel pain in the first place it just means that eventually that pain has given its purpose and you’re ready to move beyond it the purpose of pain in a larger context is to give us all empathy for other people when you, trip like let’s say you see someone and they trip and they fall and you laugh you say haha so funny and then you trip and you fall and you hurt your knee and you get embarrassed and you hurt then you say oh maybe I shouldn’t laugh next time I see someone trip you know maybe I there was nothing I could have done to prevent myself from tripping and it was embarrassing and it hurt

so now I have empathy when I see someone trip and fall and I might go over and I might help them instead of laughing at them pain helps us gives us a context for understanding other people’s potential situations and gives us an ability to tune into unconditional love and awareness pain is okay it’s a it also helps us know where you know if you put your hand in a fire it’s going to burn all your skin off

so it’s good to be having that pain to realign yourself in Unicult we often compare pain to the sidelines of mariokart if you go off the track you get into a spiral of pain and that is there to remind you that you’re not meant to be there you’re not meant to simply spiral out on the sidelines of Mario Cart that’s an indicator to go back on the path of joy to get back on the path where you can go freely forward into your life’s purpose and your life’s work love that Mario Cart situation

so empathy is something that we get from pain knowledge is something that we get from pain and there’s nothing wrong with having a responsive pain in a situation if you get hurt and something bad happens it’s okay to feel mad and hurt and upset but eventually you learn all the lessons that pain can possibly teach you and at that point you’re done with it at that point you’re ready to move beyond it this can’t be rushed this can’t be you know this isn’t I can’t say oh it’s only three days and then you’re done no it might be years that you have to stay in this pain but there’s this understanding I was just thinking about this recently with someone and it’s the idea of this victimhood mentality and it’s the idea of associating yourself to your wound a lot of times since we live on earth and there are so many painful experiences and we all have trauma sometimes we associate our entire personalities our entire self-worth our entire selves to the bad things that happen to us and this is a confusing area because the bad things that happened to us definitely affect us and they definitely shape us but we have the potential to actually show our true character through how we respond to that pain instead of just if someone hurts you instead of just saying well that person hurt me and recycling and reliving that pain your true character your the way that it truly reflects who you are is about how you respond to it and how you can possibly transform that pain into love and love is really hard to get to if you’re in a place of pain if someone specifically hurt you but that is the goal when we talk about love and we talk about forgiveness when someone hurts us we are actually talking about a huge amount of transmutation –all energy and we’re also talking about something that is going to radically benefit your life if someone hurts you and you hold on to a grudge who is that hurting we have to look from a higher perspective we have to look from an energetic perspective and we have to see the world through the eyes of pure energy if we can do that then we can understand these things much easier if somebody says you’re dumb and then you sit there and you’re like oh that hurt I’m so mad at that person and they just go about their life energetically what do you see that if you’re mad and you’re holding a grudge you’re actually creating and generating a ton of negative energy they might have triggered that in you but it’s your responsibility to figure out how to transmute that energy because they can’t they have no eventually you have to realize other people don’t have power over your own emotions people can affect you people can trigger you but eventually it’s up to you to show your character to raise your vibration into one of unconditional love and that’s through forgiveness

so when you forgive people it helps you it doesn’t even matter if it helps them because when you hold a grudge that energy is only affecting you that energy is poisoning your energy that energy is cycling in your consciousness in your body and not theirs they might feel it a little bit but it has to come from your own body your own soul

When you are holding a grudge with someone and you’re mad at them and you’re angry at them it’s mostly hurting you and this is just practical brasstacks situation this is just how it’s working does this mean that you need to let abusers back into your life does this mean that you need to continue to get hurt by someone not at all this means that you need to have unconditional love for and foremost for yourself this means protecting yourself and this means setting boundaries and when you are able to set boundaries when you are able to feel safe in your own security only then can you start to practice this radical acceptance and practice this radical forgiveness for other people you don’t even need to tell them that you’re forgiving them it doesn’t need to be an ego based thing but you need to practice forgiveness in yourself because it will transmute your negative energy and it will help you alleviate your suffering

We say that suffering is a choice we say that we are here to experience pain to build our knowledge and to build our empathy and then from that point once we learn everything we need to learn from the pain it’s up to us to flex our muscles and transmute that energy through the power of forgiveness into radical love and that will transform your entire psyche or entire consciousness it will literally raise the vibration of your energy you will feel lighter you will feel better you won’t be carrying that weight these are words we all understand because it’s that heavy to be upset with someone

so in fundamentals we have a few starting phrases to let go of suffering

I’m going to ask you to think about someone who’s hurt you either recently or someone who really hurt you in the past and think about these phrases and I encourage you to say them out loud and just see how it feels you might have a strong repulsion to it because you’re really holding on to your pain and that’s okay this is all about learning about your consciousness this is about learning about your response to these situations and it’s about transmitting your energy it’s just about understanding your own consciousness

Try this I forgive myself and everyone who has ever hurt me and you might feel that go through you into your stomach you might feel like go through to your feet you might feel it make you dizzy like it might be a very powerful thing to say I forgive myself and everyone who has ever hurt me you can type it in the chatbox too if you want I am growing each day into the highest version of myself forgiveness isn’t just about other people it’s about ourselves to the beings around me love and care for me I am filled with love and kindness I deserve to be happy there’s a few other ones here but those are like the ones I wanted to read mostly

It’s important to practice these affirmations and just see where you’re at with them see how it makes you feel we can manipulate our energy toward positivity anytime we want says princess Marie Marissa I think that’s probably true and Spencer says I can’t say I truly forgive everyone there’s just one person left and that just might because you don’t have strong enough boundaries too

If you don’t feel like you’re safe from situations completely it might be very hard to forgive people because your pain is working as a protector it’s like putting your hand on fire and your pain is like no I’m not going to go near that fire I’m not going to put my hand on that fire again that’s okay that means you need to set boundaries.

It’s really a two step process of well it’s more than two steps but let’s just make it easy setting boundaries and then practicing that forgiveness and that forgiveness can take years I was I practiced for me I had a violent rape that happened to me in college and it was very painful it was socially painful it was legally painful it was painful because of my relationship to the person who did it to me and for years it was very hard to navigate the ability to forgive that person especially because they didn’t want to talk about it I really wanted to resolve it and they didn’t want to talk about it and

I worked really hard whenever it would come up in my consciousness to practice sending them love and sending them forgiveness and seeing the situation from the highest perspective it’s it took years and then eventually I ended up writing a piece on medium and they saw it and they reached out to me and they actually came to Los Angeles and we had a conversation and we talked about what had happened 10 years prior and were able to understand one another and it was a very huge radical shift in my life and I was very lucky to have that person be as accountable and as open as they were and obviously they were lucky to have me be as accountable and open as I was to and

We came to it from a very mature place you know were very young when it happened and were able to talk about it and only because I had done so much work over those 10 years of practicing forgiveness for this person was I able to have that conversation in such a mature way but I just want to say this story because it’s possible and it radically changed my life it made my soul feel lighter and I think it probably did the same for him assaults are hard to forgiveness is hard what about self forgiveness you wish you could be happy you can be happy you need to go so much further with these affirmations you’re not ready yet and I think that’s I think you guys are all saying the same things this is hard and I’m not ready for this and I think that’s an amazing and important thing to recognize if you can see the potential goal of practicing forgiveness for yourself first and foremost I think that a lot of times when remanded ourselves we’re taking on other people’s words we’re taking on other people’s expectations of who we should be I think forgiving the self starts with the fact that you know that you did your best at every moment

If you’re working on self forgiveness start there I know that I was doing my best in every moment and if you hurt somebody else and you know that you were doing something wrong then acknowledge that make space for their pain if you can make space for them and say how can I repair this for you at the same time forgive yourself because you were always acting in a way that you thought was the best and from that place forgiveness of others is much easier because if you look at your own actions and you say huh I know I hurt other people in the past and I know that I was doing my best I just wasn’t there yeah I wasn’t like I wasn’t healed I wasn’t aware I wasn’t responsible I wasn’t mature whatever your reasoning is for having hurt people you can say well I just wasn’t there yet and I know now I would have acted different

If you know now that you would have acted differently if you know now that you did your best then that’s the starting place forgive me forgiving yourself and when you start to do that and you start to look at all these other people in your life who have caused you pain and you start to try to get empathy for them through the understanding but they also were doing their best maybe they were healed maybe they weren’t mature enough maybe they weren’t ready then you can start to empathize and you can start to see the bigger picture from this purely energetic reality of learning and of growth and it doesn’t mean you need to be close to them it doesn’t mean you need to have anything to do with them but the work that you do in this space will radically transform your own life and that’s why it’s really important to practice this it’s not about them it’s really not it’s really about your own consciousness and the weight that you are carrying in your anger in your pain in your suffering and in your hatred so that looks like a very dramatic story

Sso suffering comes from not having anywhere else to go you feel like you need to stay in suffering because you feel like it’s serving you it’s like an addiction it’s just like an addiction like anything else if you are in a space of suffering you’re in a space of prolonged pain and you know you already learned your lessons of pain and you’re ready to leave that suffering the next step is hopefulness and from that state of hopefulness you can say maybe your affirmations are I believe I will one day be able to forgive those who have hurt me and even if even that’s a good place to start because if you can be hopeful toward your healing if you can be hopeful for this understanding that eventually you will be able to ascend all of this pain and you will be able to rise into a state of love for yourself and for others then you’re already bringing in a unit Opium paradise because you’re shifting your energy from that downward spiral of cycling the cynical cyclical suffering spiral and you’re spinning it back around into a more positive one and hopefulness is that key if you’re down at the bottom you have nowhere left to go and you’re just cycling hopefulness is the next step I believe I will one day be happy I believe I will one day be fulfilled I believe one day I’ll have only supportive people around me if you can believe those things they are possible you will start to reverse that’s that spiral into the higher realms I never thought forgiveness was possible but I see now that it’s just difficult especially when you’re suffering seems unfair but you must forgive and move on and it’s up to you to build a paradigm around your suffering around your pain I mean

For me I personally feel I’m at a place where I can confidently say I’m a star seed everything bad that happened to me helped me grow into the person that I meant to be and I’m here to offer my wisdom that I’ve gotten from all of my traumatic experiences and my wisdom hasn’t come from my traumatic experiences my wisdom has come from overcoming my traumatic experiences

I think that all these traumatic experiences were just opportunities for me to learn and to grow and to really rise up and to flex those muscles of love and see the higher reality if you don’t want to believe that you don’t have to that’s my personal paradigm to help me enjoy my life because if I didn’t believe that I would be a victim and I would just remain a victim and my energy would be very bad and I would be the one who would have to deal with that it would be cycling in my own consciousness in my own body dreams are a great place to start forgiveness when I started forgiving my rapist it was all in dreams I was having good dreams of him and I thought well that makes it a lot easier because I could see him in a higher light if you want to forgive somebody – I’ll give you one more tip is to look at them and try to see their higher self try to see their higher self try to see who they really are try to see their heart and if you can see their heart and you can see that they are just confused and trapped in this ego based three dimensional time-space reality then it can be much easier to connect with that aspect of themselves which you can feel deserves forgiveness you can maybe see their childhood their child self or their higher self those things can really help you transform your understanding of another person and it’s very rare that people do things to try to hurt us and that’s a it’s a huge lesson that I had to learn I literally thought everyone was walking around trying to hurt me constantly and that’s a BPD thing that’s a narcissism thing but it’s also something that we all believe to a certain degree if you could understand most people aren’t evil cruel people walking around trying to hurt other people like Psychopaths they’re actually just confused they’re actually just in pain themselves they’re actually just not that mature they actually just don’t know how to express what they need or what they want in a way that’s healthier conducive

A lot of times the things that have happened to you weren’t because people were trying to hurt you it’s because they were hurting themselves –

It’s a lot of compassion you have to drum up it’s a lot of love and it’s a lot of forgiveness okay thank you for joining me for Cam Church.