To risk talking about myself, yet again. People have often marvelled at my tolerance of pain. Despite the neurological abnormalities, I have another reason why I tolerate physical pain so well.

Pain confronted directly, experienced vividly, without recourse to emotion or other filters, is just sensation. My own condition presents every sensory stimuli with an intensity and persistence that, well… In a sense, every sight and sound and even emotion is pain. I have learned to regulate my emotional reactions primarily to avoid the pain of the physical component. Adrenaline for me is an agonizing burn.

So when your cat crawls up your leg, you don’t feel his claws? I do feel little Daemons claws as he walks across my lap, and I feel the glare of sunlight pounding into my eyes, and the din of sound playing out in my ears. It’s all just experience. Sorrow for me would be misplaced. My life is vibrant and full of wonder.

You feel more intense sympathetic pain? Yes, in a sense that is true. The way I respond to sympathetic pain is different. I have come to navigate sensory pain easily. It’s an effortless habit by now, but the pain of a psychological state, those pains that persist because of someone’s fear or fixed point of view, these get my attention.

Now my responses to these states differ from the normal as do all those who engage in a death defiance practice. When your own feelings have been pushed to the utmost only to rebound back to centre, especially when this becomes a regular even routine experience, you can’t continue to perceive psychological distress in the same way.

One example, fear. It is oh so repetitive. Always someone anywhere feels they have something to fear, and the things they say and do are all touched by this fear. Their efforts to seek love are touched with fear. Their efforts to enjoy art or music are also touched with fear. Everything leached of some measure of its full quality, all because of the hesitancy brought on by living in a practised state of fear, and this fear spreads making all those who open to them on an empathic level have at least a moment where life is just a bit more gray, a bit more dead.

This inspires a mix of empathy and anger in me. I understand how they come by their fear. I understand why they believe in it with such faith, but the process of shared fear, the memetic edifice that grows in a community where fear is common, this just moves me to anger. Do I lack wisdom because of this? Perhaps so. It is where I am at.

We have the capacity for anger by virtue of nature’s gifts. It will always manifest in one guise or another. I accept this about myself. It gives me some measure of peace and freedom to move on.

I suggest that you “sit” (bring awareness to) with it. Oh, I do sit with it. In fact, while I sit I open my awareness to the seething pulse of energy that manifests in our world as all the passions. I find it grounding. For me, my own energy gravitates there, and I explore other points from that centre.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~