Pain Has Something to Tell Us
“Is pain real?” she asked me. “Does pain have to be a reality?”
I heard her answer implied in the question. “No,” was her answer. “Pain is simply low-level state of mind,” I could hear her say.
She’s on a mission to forever feel good. She has a half-million-dollar business built on the idea that you can live a life, and even more importantly create and run a successful business without feeling pain. In fact the more you feel pain, the less successful you’ll probably be.
I paid her thousands of dollars to help me find my way to pain–free success. You can guess how that went.
It’s not bad intentions. This kind of thing is the foundation of the multi-billion dollar self-help and coaching industry. And it’s lucrative and successful because we humans are wired to do anything we can to avoid pain and seek pleasure.
Who doesn’t want to feel good?
Who doesn’t want to inhabit a promised land where pain is non-existent, and pleasure and feeling good abound, AND not only that, you get to have unimaginable abundance once you are there?
Who doesn’t want to follow someone who tells you they live there and can get you in the door?
For a price, of course. No pain, no gain right…?
The other thing I heard in her question was how deep her sense of self-protection goes. She holds one of the strongest boundaries with other people that I’ve ever seen. At times I’ve admired it and even tried to emulate it because boundaries can be healthy. But in the moment of her question, I couldn’t help but feel a hidden aspect. I felt the interior room of her own pain tucked away behind her strong walls.
It’s a room we all have — the soft, tender place within us that we build fortresses around. Inside lives our fragile secret — we are intimate with pain.
We build protective palaces to prevent ourselves from feeling the pain we’ve already felt. We build them to keep ourselves safe from what has already damaged us. We build them thinking we can escape this living intimacy.
I know, I’ve done it. I still do it.
What I am coming to see more and more clearly is, yes, pain is real. And that’s okay. That’s not a problem. There’s nothing to be fixed.
Have you noticed how when you express any kind of pain, the first thing most people want to do is fix you?
We live in a society that has no tolerance for pain. We try to avoid it at all costs. We pay to get away from it. We don’t like when others express it because it triggers our own. We drift away from people who are in a lot of pain because we don’t know how to be present with pain.
We live in a society that demonizes pain at that same time our collective expression and experience of pain is skyrocketing. Narcotics addiction and heroine use are at an all time high because people are in pain. Physical pain. Emotional pain. Spiritual pain. Mental pain.
Pain is not something to deny. It is real. And it has something to tell us. Pain is a doorway to the here and now of our lives. If we can be present to pain, we can be present for everything.
Poet, David Whyte, says this of pain:
“Physical or emotional pain is an ultimate form of ground, saying to each of us, in effect, there is no other place than this place, no other body than this body, no other limb or joint or pang or sharpness or heartbreak but this searing presence…Pain is a form of alertness and particularity; pain is a way in.”
Another big buzzword in the self-help, coaching industry is Truth. When you leave pain out of the story, you only get half of the story. You don’t get the full truth.
What we really want is the full truth. That’s what makes us feel good. We feel good when we have the whole picture, not just part of a picture, even if there are parts that we’d rather not see or feel. We hurt more when they are missing. We feel good when we feel real. We feel real when we inhabit the full range of our human condition, including the pain.
I, like the poets I admire, am choosing to walk toward the pain of living rather than further away from it because it brings me here, now, to the precious moment of my life. It doesn’t mean dwelling in misery as so many fear. It means dwelling in the fullness of what life actually is. It means inhabiting the full truth.
Arriving there is success, and it is the only place where I can feel a sustainable pleasure because I have left nothing out. There I find the good feeling that arises from the sacred intimacy of the pain I have known so well.
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