What can you learn from your pain?

That nothing like suffering, can promote strength.

Pain is always there, we all face it. To me it’s like waves that you can use to propel yourself forward or you can let them destroy you where you stand. That choice is always yours because pain is pure and indifferent. You can’t bury or destroy it like an enemy, you face it and live with it like a bitchy mother-in-law. You have to see her on occasion but you can’t let her rule your life.

Pain has taught me two things:

1. How to avoid the same pain in the future.

2. Letting go of old pain is, well, painless. It’s the holding on that hurts.

Pain is something you learn to live with as you age and after a while it becomes an irritant and not an intense, crippling feeling.

We can’t know joy without a little pain. And the greater the pain, the greater the joy can be. Once we remove ourselves from the cause of the pain, getting past it is our own work.

This is a Great Question. Thank you.

This question will take some reflection on my part. I doubt I can answer quickly.

Pain taught me what people and situations to avoid. As a child and youth, it taught me to be silent.

I have spent years regaining my voice. Learning to speak again helped me find joy. In fact, it helped me find my joy. I know for the first time in my life where my passion lies.

Pain taught me that I like to feel. When I complained of pain, I was advised to get a thick skin. I don’t want one. I want to be sensitive.

Slowly, pain is teaching me to look past the hurt I feel at others’ words or actions and see the persons and see their stories. Ever so slowly, pain is teaching me to look past me and see the other.

I try really hard to learn two things from pain. How did I contribute to getting it? and What can I do differently next time?

Anytime something hurts, I immediately think “Well, I’m not doing that again.”. I guess that’s all I’ve learned.

I have a new broken record that I’m playing as appropriate. Let’s start with a different assumption—that we exist as we do to taste of experience. Not that we grow and refine taste over time, but that we come into being to this end. I don’t prefer the word, karma, but it is a good enough placeholder. So, perhaps, we are not learning from pain so much as soaking up as much of it as is needed to fulfill a desire.

Pain also is only present so long as it has our attention. If forgotten, it may as well not exist. If the pain you speak of is so real and primary, how is it possible to forget and have disappear? If it is so pliable, is it really real? Or is it dependent upon our energy and attention?

Further, is it you who is pained, or is there a you that observes the pain? (Sit with this question and feel for the answer without too much thinking.) if your situation is the latter, then what is the disposition of the observer? (Answer for yourself.)

If there is an observer, is there anything that can cause the observer pain?

to answer your last question, it taught me that “reality” is reallly wobbly and led me to that which isn’t.

Chronic pain narrows a person’s world. It’s really easy to become very self focused, and the longer you live like that, the more isolated you can become. It is a rare person who can be open and free, relating properly to others while living in constant pain.

Pain arises from different causes. Often, I have discovered a bruise or a small cut and wondered where it came from. From the size of the wound, I must have felt it when it happened, yet I am clueless as to its cause. I have heard that childbirth can be extremely painful, but that while women remembered being in pain few if any remembered the pain itself. Good thing, otherwise the population would crash. However, @janbb‘s question is more about psychological pain, “unresolved childhood wound,” then physical pain.

Peace comes in those moments one is free to take for granted. It is not so much the violence of one’s experience as it is the expectation of it recurring that alters one’s perception of reality. Being at-the-ready for extended periods will produce an outlier.

Dysfunctional families inflect emotional wounds. Mechanisms of defense arise, seldom consciously. As with any wound, a small stimulus triggers pain. The social environment affords many opportunities for an accidental initiation of a defense mechanism. With the mechanisms come rationalizations justifying reactions, until one becomes conscious of this reflex and can examine the context of the trigger.

1. Treat it. If money, time, research, etc., can lead to a cessation of the pain, make that investment. Don’t think it’s noble to endure in silence. Try to make it better.

2. Once you’ve done all you can, focus on what doesn’t hurt, as opposed to what does. Practice detachment.

3. Make accommodations so that you can live as normal a life as possible, without limitations caused by your pain. This might require ongoing treatment. If the pain is psychic, a therapist, meditation, etc. If it’s physical, pain management.

4. Patience, patience, patience. And kindness. Love yourself because of your “flaws,” not in spite of them.

Pain is what gives you a reference point to judge joy and love and happiness levels. if your emotions were a flat line, you’d never experience the highs. It’s the lows that give you a better appreciation of the highs.

From a posting this evening on Facebook by Buddhist Boot Camp:

The smallest nutshell the entire teachings of the Buddha can be squeezed into: Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

@zenvelo Sounds good as a concept but I find it a little simplistic. If one lost one’s whole family in a fire it would be hard not to suffer greatly.

Suffer: “1. To feel pain or distress; sustain loss, injury, harm, or punishment. 2. To tolerate or endure evil, injury, pain, or death.” The problem is that often suffering continues after the original pain has subsided, creating and sustaining secondary pain. This suffering is optional when one is conscious of its presence.