6 Steps To Transform Pain Into Learning
Pain is inherent in life. It is part of it, just like pleasure and joy. We tend to think of it as a fatal coincidence, a whim of fate, but it is nothing more than an extension of our existence. That is why we cannot avoid it, and any effort that will be made to that end would prove to be useless and in vain.
Pain, like joy, brings us closer to our most primary essence. Both give us the most important lessons in our lives and guide our steps.
However, often, we transform pain into suffering. In a bitter and eternal sip that we drink dry. It is as if we are desperately seeking to suffer more than what we are already suffering.
There is nothing wrong with being nostalgic, or wanting to stay with your pain; sometimes it is even necessary. To have this coffee with ourselves, to find ourselves in front of our most lonely intimacy. This meeting with our humanity.
Most worrying, and what causes even more suffering than what we already feel, is all this weight that is added when the path that we are crossing is littered with enough obstacles. We add this weight to ourselves when, for example, we say to ourselves that this sadness will last forever, that it is not over.
Now, there is good news: we can reverse this additional suffering and, better yet, we can make it a learning experience that exponentially increases our existential wisdom.
How? ‘Or’ What ? José Antonio Garcia-Monge, one of the psychologists and one of the most influential people in my life, explains it in one of his books: when someone participated in the personal process through which so many worried minds, he attains a wisdom which allows him to verify once again that pain is human and inseparable from the act of living, but also that suffering is an artifice that we add and from which we cannot get rid of.
We need to identify our pain and know if it is pain that affects us psychically, physically, socially, existentially … There are different types of pain, and we must be able to recognize our own, face it and stay with her for a while on that special date we were talking about earlier in this article.
To start a dialogue with her, we need to be clear on something; pain alerts us and shows us that something is not working, that something is interrupting our peace of mind. This is why we have to understand where this pain comes from, and why it arises.
By answering these questions, we have already achieved a great victory. But to do that, we need to be honest and listen to what this pain is telling us. There’s no point in running away, driven by fear, or half-listening to him. We must listen to it with all our senses and with the greatest possible sincerity since the pain bares us.
As Garcia-Monge says, “Pain can burn part of our body. Suffering has the power to deteriorate the whole person. ” This sentence could not be more true… Suffering has the power to completely block our mind and, consequently, to render us incapable.
We turn our pain into suffering from the moment we project ourselves into time; we endow it with infinite permanence or we enlarge it with catastrophic and hopeless messages.
Taking responsibility for our pain comes through recognizing what we are doing to make it worse. For her to grow and grow again so that a thin rain eventually turns into a flood.
Again, putting OUR responsibility on others is a wasteful exercise that will end up generating even more pain in us. In fact, generally, it is the deceptions that survive the shortest.
By going through the previous stages, we will already have achieved enough goals; indeed, this will allow us to know a peace that, on the other hand, we will never find if we postpone the meeting with pain. A face to face meeting.
Maybe we were able to appease him with something that helps us and anchors us to life. Each person is unique and knows what can help them and what cannot help them. No one solution has the same effectiveness for everyone. And living is that.
“To know existentially that we are greater than our own pain ” said Garcia-Monge. Once again, a moving sentence to write. Being greater than our own pain involves assuming that we are NOT uniquely and exclusively our pain.
We are more than that. It involves recognizing that we have very powerful resources that we must discover and use to help and accompany us in this transition so difficult but so human as that of going from pain to learning.
So, you, all these people who are going through a bad patch, we invite you to listen to yourself with the honesty that this requires, to assume what belongs to you and not others, and to embrace yourselves.
