Last update: February 17, 2017
Pain is inherent in life. It is part of it, just as it is made up of fun and happiness. We have a tendency to think that it is a fatal chance, a whim of fate, but it is nothing more than an extension of our existence. For this reason, we cannot avoid it and all the effort invested in this will be unnerving and useless.
Pain, like joy, brings us closer to our most primordial essence. Both of them they give us very important lessons and we need them to guide our steps in life.
However, many times we turn pain into suffering. In a bitter and eternal sip that we even drink in an aggressive and morbid way. We come out of it really bad, as it is as if somehow we are desperately looking for more suffering than what already exists.
Suffering is an addition to pain, not pain itself
It is not bad to feel nostalgic or to want to be alone in our pain. What's more, sometimes it is even necessary. Drinking a coffee alone, enjoying that moment of reunion with our most solitary intimacy, that reunion with our humanity.
The most disturbing aspect, and which causes even more suffering than we already feel, is all the weight we add as we climb this steeply inclined mountain that we sometimes choose. We add this weight when, for example, we tell ourselves that this sadness will last forever, that it is infinite, that we are sold to his will.
Making pain a growing experience
However, there is good news: we can take advantage of this extra suffering and better yet, we can make it a growth experience that exponentially increases our existential wisdom.
How? When we participate in the personal process through which so many restless minds have passed, we reach a wisdom that allows us to verify several times that pain is human and inseparable to the act of living, but that suffering is an artifice that we add and to which we can deprive ourselves.
1. The pain must be acknowledged
Our suffering must be identified. Knowing if it is a pain that affects me on a psychic, physical, social, existential level ... There are several types and we must be able to recognize it, to look at it and to be alone with it for a moment in this special meeting we were talking about earlier.
2. Maintain an honest dialogue with pain
To begin to dialogue with pain, we must be very clear that is warning us of a problem. Something is disrupting our peace of mind. For this reason, we need to understand where this pain is coming from and why it is appearing.
By answering these questions, we already achieve great success. However, you have to be honest and listen to what the pain wants to tell us. It is not worth running away in horror, nor listening to these questions in half. We must listen to them with all our senses and with the greatest possible sincerity, as pain strips us and discovers us.
3. Don't turn it into suffering
“Pain can burn a part of our body. Suffering has the power to damage the whole person ". An apt phrase, since suffering has the power to completely block our mind and, therefore, to invalidate us.
We transform our pain into suffering the moment we project it into time, endow it with an infinite permanence or magnify it with catastrophic and hopeless messages that we send to ourselves.
4. We must be responsible for it
This does not mean blaming ourselves, that guilt which, instead of giving peace, eradicates it completely. Being responsible for our pain involves recognizing what we are doing to increase it, to magnify it to the point that a light rain ends up becoming a flood.
Understanding how we can help each other or how we can ask for help to manage it in the best possible way. Passing our responsibility on to others is once again a useless exercise which will eventually cause us more pain. It is one of the least surviving deceptions.
5. Free ourselves from pain without setting it aside
With the previous steps, we will have already achieved a lot. They allow us to achieve that peace that we cannot find by constantly postponing the appointment with pain. A face-to-face and alone meeting.
Maybe we can calm it down with something that helps us and anchors us to life. Each person is unique and knows what he can help them and what not. There are no equally effective solutions for everyone, much less magic wands. This is precisely the process of living.
6. To mature with it (or despite it)
You have to understand that we are greater than our own pain. This means accepting that we are not only and exclusively our pain.
We are more than it. It means recognizing that we have very powerful resources that we must discover and use to help and accompany us in this difficult, but human transition, which is the passage from pain to growth.
Therefore, we invite all the people who are having a bad time to listen to each other with the necessary honesty, to accept what is their responsibility, and not that of others, and to hug each other. At the beginning and at the end, in this growth of our life.
