Pain Is a Warning Bell

Many people (including me more often than I'd like to admit) perceive pain as an evil. And I think much of that is due to the Happiness Revolution that began a few decades ago. During this revolution, it was taught that everyone's main focus should be happiness -- often avoiding the intricacies that pain offers to us. Consequently, many people feel pain and then avoid it. They try to turn it off -- an impossible endeavor -- and do away with it, thus creating a false sense of happiness and never achieving true joy in their lives. They live with a sinking feeling (whether consciously realized or not) and numb themselves to true, pure joy. Joy comes from seeing pain for what it is, thanking it for providing you whatever lessons may come of it, and passing it on to the rest of the Universe as a gift, not a curse.

One experience of pain (and in my opinion, the highest-functioning) is as a warning bell. When an experience hurts, it’s often an alarm going off trying to get our attention that something needs to change. It serves the same function as physical pain. If I touch a hot stove and it burns my finger, I know to pull away ASAP.

However, when it comes to emotional or spiritual pain, we often refuse to listen and instead play the victim. We say, or think: “Ouch! This hurts! But I can’t do anything about it. That’s just the way things are. I’d rather stay where I am than face the uncertainty of change.”...and so on. Focus on the irony: Would we do this with physical pain?? If we put our finger on a hot stove and felt the burn, would we linger there with our finger thinking "Damn! I'm stuck here in this pain! I need to think about what I should do next. If I remove my finger from that which just caused it pain, I'm not sure if I will be hurt again or even more so, so I think I'll just keep it here on the stove while I figure out what to do next"?? No! And if you ever encountered someone doing that, you would immediately go to help them, and most likely judge them to be insane for doing so! So why do we engage in that type of activity with emotional or spiritual pain? Too often for comfort, I see people living in their pain. Rather than feeling the pain, realizing that something needs to change and then immediately enacting that next step, TOO MANY PEOPLE learn instead to live with the alarm bells going off 24/7.

When you listen to that warning bell and take action as a result, it doesn’t simply stop the pain. It also leads you in a positive direction. As you will experience later (whether it be immediate or cumulative), the effect of those positive steps can be huge. But it is about taking the first step. The following are questions you can use to help yourself cope with pain and with change:

* What positive change could this be catalyzing?
* What is this pain telling me? What can I do about it? Where can I go from here?
* What do I need to learn to help me move past this pain?