Why pain exists
I have spent the last few days thinking about pain. It started with the realisation that, even though my life is a very happy and blessed one, I often wake up in the morning with a slight anxiety resting in my chest. After years of self-exploration and personal growth, I still have a tendency to feel stress due to fear of letting other people down and not “being someone” in the eyes of society. This leaves me with just a little fragment of pain still stuck deep inside me, reminding me of that fear. And it has made me wonder why that pain is there. What is the purpose of that pain?
As I was exploring these thoughts, I learned that Tim “Avicii” Bergling had just passed away. I hardly knew Tim, but I have met him, worked for him and some of my best friends were very close to him. The news instantly filled my world with another type of pain, as shock and sorrow took hold of many people I love. From what I have come to understand, Tim went through a great deal of pain in his life because of pressure to perform. And now, many people who knew him, as well as many of his fans, are going through pain in their lives because they have lost someone who truly meant something to them. What is the purpose of all that pain?
We tend to grow up thinking pain is a bad thing. It’s something we should try to avoid because, well, it hurts. We learn that pain is something to be feared. But still, pain is present in all of our lives and it seems impossible to avoid running into it from time to time. So why are we trying to avoid something we cannot possibly avoid? And what is the role of pain in the bigger picture of our existence?
Pain actually has a very clear purpose, but most of us never understand it. And without understanding what pain is, we end up fleeing from it instead of learning from it.
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” — Marie Curie
Pain is simply a signal — guiding you towards the fears you need to overcome in order to transform and reach further in your personal development. Welcoming pain as a signal to be guided by is not easy, but it will lead you towards the blissful state of non-fear we all seek (what some call “enlightenment”).
If we list all the things that have brought us pain in life, the role of pain as a signal of a fear with transformational potential becomes clear. Whenever we feel emotional pain, such as anxiety or sorrow, it signals the existence of fear and the start of a transformational process inside us, which we need to work through in order to rid ourselves of the fear and reach a state of non-fear.
For instance, when I feel anxiety thinking about work, it signals that I have fears connected to my work that I need to overcome. Or when I was overwhelmed with sorrow as my grandfather passed away, it signalled that I had to transform by accepting his death and moving beyond the fear of no longer having him in my life.
Once we move through that process of embracing and facing our fear, the signal will fade and the pain will vanish. When we let pain guide us as a signal to accept and embrace our fears, it will transform us and we will “level up” in our quest to rid ourselves of fear and be our true selves (rather than our fear-driven egos).
Pain might feel like something we cannot control, but in a way it actually gives us power over our own lives. Pain signals an opportunity for us to choose wether to explore our fears and transform beyond them, or avoid doing that. As long as we don’t embrace the fear and transform through it, the signal will stay active and the pain will persist. The only way to turn off the signal, and make the pain go away for good, is to embrace the fear and work through it. The choice, however, is ours alone. We are never victims of our pain.
Do we listen to the pain signal or do we ignore it?
If you choose to listen, you will embark on a journey that will be challenging but lead to transformation. If you choose to ignore the signal, it will keep growing louder until you cannot ignore it any longer. The pain will then be so deafening that there won’t be room for anything else in your life. We call that depression. Depression is like the Dolby surround sound system of pain. You cannot escape a signal that loud, and your entire being is so overrun by it that finding the way through the pain might seem impossible. But even in such a miserable state, you will still eventually have to embark on a journey of transformation. For some though, the only way out of such overwhelming emotional pain is to instead transform through physical pain. As we desperately need transformation to weaken the pain signal, we use whatever transformational paths we can find — one of which being the transformation from fear to non-fear we call death. All forms of physical pain is a signal indicating that if that pain in your body continues, it will eventually transform you by killing your body.
So in essence, emotional pain is signal that it is time to work through fear and move closer to non-fear, while physical pain is the signal of an initiated death transformation.
In the grander scheme of things, moving from fear to non-fear is the constant battle of existence. Every life form is fighting this battle. In your own life, you try to rid yourself of the fear inside you, just like everyone around you is trying to rid themselves of the fears inside them. Even our relationships are all about transforming us from fear to non-fear. Every relationship is just two living organisms trying to co-exist in non-fear. If and when they cannot transform beyond their fears, the active relationship will come to an end, and they both move on to keep doing their transformational work by themselves or with a new partner. Pain in relationships is, once again, just a signal of fears we need to overcome in order to transform and reach further. Pain is a friend who tries to help us to reach the bliss beyond our fears. We just need to listen to that friend, embrace it and surrender to what it is telling us.
As a write this, I am in pain. My chest feels empty, tears are building up and my thoughts cannot focus on anything but what this pain is telling me. This pain teaches me the importance of helping each other to deal with our fears. I am grateful for its guidance.
Tim, I don’t know why or how you died, but I hope you have found peace as the signal of pain is now finally quiet. ❤
