6 Steps To Turning Pain Into Learning
Pain is inherent in life. It is part of her in the same way that joy is. We tend to think it’s a coincidence, a quirk of fate, but it’s nothing more than an extension of our own existence. That is why we cannot dodge it, and every effort put into it will be exhausting and useless.
Pain, like joy, brings us closer to our most primal essence. Both give us more important lessons and serve to guide our steps in life.
However, we often turn pain into suffering, into a bitter and eternal drink that we even drink in an aggressive and morbid way. The ones who are worse off are ourselves… as it is somehow as if we are desperately looking for more suffering than what already exists.
Suffering is an extra attachment to pain, it is not pain itself
It’s not bad to feel nostalgic or want to be alone with our own pain. Not only that, sometimes you have to go through that moment. Having coffee with ourselves, having a time to reconnect with our own loneliest intimacy, an encounter with our humanity.
Most unsettling, and causing even more suffering than we are already feeling, is all the weight we add to the pain as we climb this steep mountain we sometimes choose. We ourselves add this weight when, for example, we decide that this sadness will last forever, that it is not finite, that we are given to its desire.
Turning pain into a learning experience
But there’s good news: It ‘s possible to reverse this extra suffering and, even better, we can turn it into a learning experience that exponentially increases our existential wisdom.
Like? José Antonio Garcia-Monge explained this in one of his books. It turns out that when someone has participated in the personal process that so many restless minds have gone through, they attain a wisdom that allows them to prove at all times that pain is human and inseparable from the act of living, but suffering is a device we add and from which we can to strip.
1. It is necessary to recognize the pain
We need to identify our own suffering. Knowing if it’s a pain that affects me psychically, physically, socially, existentially… There are different types and we need to be able to recognize it, to look it in the face and stay with it for a moment in this very special encounter we’ve been talking about previously.
2. Maintain a sincere dialogue with her
To start dialoguing with her, it is necessary to take into account one thing: the pain is warning us that something is not going well. Something is interrupting our peace of mind. So we need to understand where this pain comes from and why it is showing up.
By answering these questions, we will have already taken a big step. But to ask these questions you have to be honest with yourself and listen to what this pain wants to tell us. It’s not worth running away scared, nor listening to it halfway. It is necessary to listen to it with all our senses and as sincerely as possible, as the pain strips us and discovers us.
3. Don’t turn it into suffering
As Garcia-Monge says: “Pain can burn a part of our own body. Suffering has the power to deteriorate the whole person”. What an apt phrase… Suffering has the power to block our minds completely and therefore make us powerless.
We transform our pain into suffering the moment we project it into time, endow it with an infinite duration, or augment it with catastrophic and hopeless messages that we send to ourselves.
4. We need to take responsibility for it
This does not mean taking the blame. This guilt that, far from bringing peace, robs it. Taking responsibility for the pain itself involves identifying what I am doing to increase it. So that it grows so that a light rain turns into a flood.
How can I help myself or how can I ask for help to be able to deal with this in the best possible way? Placing my responsibility on others is once again a useless exercise that will end up making the situation worse.
5. Get rid of it without moving it
With the previous steps we will have already advanced a lot. They bring that peace that we don’t find when we constantly postpone the encounter with pain. A face-to-face meeting alone.
Maybe we can appease her with something that will help me and something that will hold me back to life. Each person is unique and knows what can help and what doesn’t. There are no solutions that are equally effective for everyone, nor magic wands. The process of living is this.
6. Mature with her (or despite her)
“Knowing existentially that we are greater than our own pain” , said Gardía-Monge. Once again, a sentence that moves me to write. Being bigger implies assuming that we are not our pain solely and exclusively.
We are more than her. It implies recognizing that we have very powerful resources that we need to discover and use to help us in this very difficult, yet so human transition, which is to pass the pain of learning.
Therefore, to all people who are going through a difficult time, I invite you to listen with the sincerity that this requires, assume what is yours and not others, and embrace yourself. In the end, this is the learning of our lives.
