#4 Pain Is Your Friend
~ 10 minute read ~
Pain hurts. We will do almost anything to avoid it, but at what cost?
How often do we get into even worse situations by not facing up to a fear? Most likely an imagined fear at that.
Pain is information, whether it’s physical or emotional. In some cases it’s extreme information and we can’t process it as well as we’d like to think. Nonetheless it is telling us something about a situation, or a person or a relationship.
There is good pain that’s designed to preserve us - don’t touch fire, don’t run through stinging nettles, don’t step on that Lego piece. Then there’s the bad pain - prolonged stress, anxiety, fear that paralyses us so that we’re too scared to try anything. When in a stressed state, the body secretes cortisol which is fine for a short period because it helps us with our evolutionary “fight or fight” mechanism. However, if stress goes on too long - weeks, months, years, that’s where health issues arise. Inflammation starts to take hold - aches, pains, migraines, over longer term it can lead to heart issues and even cause cancer!
Breathe, be calm.
Becoming aware of our pain and accepting it is a great start. Humans will do almost anything to avoid pain. Emotional pain and suffering is tricky. One of my favourite quotes on suffering and pain comes from the Stoic Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius:
“Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”
Often, the way we choose to feel pain about a situation is entirely self-made. When we feel wronged, rejected or hurt - where has the pain originated? The pain hasn’t come from anyone else, even if your partner, spouse, friend, colleague has said or done something - the pain comes from you choosing to feel injured by their words or actions. It may even be a misunderstanding in which case, you’ve chosen to suffer for no reason whatsoever.
“Worrying is like paying a debt you don’t owe.”
- Mark Twain
It is difficult, we’re human, we’re emotional beings. I’ve chosen to feel injured lots of times. Pain is short term, suffering is long term. Once the pain has healed, the suffering remains. Why is that? We give energy to it so it’s fuel to a fire.
Pain is a transformational agent if you choose to embrace and use it for your own growth and benefit. It can benefit others around you too. If pain is information, it’s a learning point, a lesson or a message. It depends on how aware you are and if you’re a good student or not. If you keep getting the same pain, the same message, stop and listen to what it’s trying to teach you. Once you stop, acknowledge and learn from it then you’ve shaped a new pattern for being.
If you liken pain to a sculptor’s chisel, you will then see how you can use it to carve, form and shape the raw material, which is you now, into something creative, beautiful, strong - a masterpiece. Take this pain and this lump of marble, use the pain to chip away at the things you want to improve upon and over time, you’ll become Michelangelo’s “David” - well, your own beautiful sculpture. The brilliant thing is, this sculpture is never finished, it’s a constant work in progress. There’s plenty of raw material for you, lots of opportunities for you to refine, mould, shape, flex, bend, manifest into whatever it is that you want to become.
Most of my pain stemmed from anger. I was always angry, ready to explode at the smallest trigger. Looking back I’m learning more about why, figuring out how I allowed my pain to become anger. Now I’m taking the time to heal my pain, my anger has almost disappeared completely. It’s still there lurking in the background, but now I’m aware and conscious of it I’ve removed its power. It’s like anger was my darkness and my awareness of it is shining a light into it.
Martin Luther King Jr. said it best:
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
Once I realised that my anger was merely an external representation of my inner fear, I knew I had to face my fears. Slowly I’ve been working through my fears which is why I’m less angry now. I also learned that what triggers you is what scares you most. When you see the news and certain stories make you irate, feel it, ask yourself what your anger is trying to tell you. There’s a message in your anger, your pain, your fear.
If it’s too much to handle, ask for help - family, friends, your Doctor. Call a helpline, mind.org.uk are doing excellent work. Or if that doesn’t feel appropriate, find a positive outlet - talk about your pain, try meditation, or sports. Grounding yourself in your body is a great way to get out of your mind for a bit. Get a sweat on, feel good. Tell yourself you’re ok, everything will be ok. Imagine yourself as a child, what would the adult you say to that child if they were crying? You’d say, it’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok - give yourself permission to feel your pain.
In the book “The Alchemist” by Paolo Coelho he talks about us becoming alchemists, where we take our raw base metals and transmute them into gold. By this he means, take our experiences, our pain, our emotions and use them to grow, develop and better ourselves by realising our true potential. By using what we have, take those materials and manifest them into something great.
If you try to outrun your pain you’ll never be free or happy, like a bank robber on the run from the law. Instead, stop, turn and face the pain, walk towards your fears and once you’ve dealt with it you can then become at peace with it - you become present in the Now.
The past seems less dark because you shone a light on it. It’s in the past now anyway and can’t hurt you anymore. The future seems brighter, more hopeful because you’re now no longer coming from a position of trauma. Your Now is a stronger platform from which to move forward. And besides, how often has something that seemed so big, so bad, so horrible at a certain point in time actually turned out to be not that bad after all?
“My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened”
- Michael de Montaigne
Love
LP x
