What we Learn from Pain

The pain is trying to teach you a lesson. Learn from pain and your life will get better.

If you go on ignoring the pain, rubbing dirt on it, dealing with it and taking it like a man, your life will never get better. The only thing you will have is an ability to take pain. You will have no life.

If you never realize that pain is trying to nudge you or push you in a different direction, then your life will never get better.

How could it, you are doing nothing to make it better. The pain is your subconscious pushing you to stop doing whatever it is that is causing the pain and do something else.

Think of any type of pain as physical pain. What happens if you get hurt doing something? Why you quit doing that something immediately and do something else to relieve the pain. You realize it would be stupid not to. What happens when you are playing a sport and you get injured? You stop doing it. Why? The pain is telling you that you are unable to do that sport in the condition you are in. You seek to eliminate the pain with pain relief treatments of some kind. Everyone can recognize this.

When you think of pain this way, it is so simple.

When you experience pain it is really your subconscious protecting you from whatever it is you are doing. Your subconscious is there to protect you, to ensure your survival. Pain is the way it guides you. This is how you learn from pain.

Pain is the teacher and you are the student. The question is - are you a good student who will get this the first time? Or will you be like me and go through lots and lots of pain for long periods of time? Will you just plod along taking the pain until you either die from it or are so severely damaged that you cannot deal with it no matter what you do?

I believe that the problem with not understanding how we are supposed to learn from pain is the reason that some people have fabulous lives of wealth, abundance, prosperity, romance, love and joy and most people have none of those things.

The people who learn from pain get it.

The people who do not learn, never do. They just endure the pain for all their lives.

You probably do not learn from pain. You probably have endured your pain stoically for most of your life. You take to heart all the sayings throughout the ages.

You think you are a man, that you are tough, that you can endure, that you have to take the pain.

What if all of these ideas of a man, or of anyone, needing to take the pain, are all wrong. What if the reason for you taking pain is really a way for others to manipulate you do get what they want? They do not want you to learn from pain and stop doing things that harm you.

Think of men going to war. Isn't the idea of you getting killed or hurt in war unbelievably stupid? Why would a man go to war unless it was to physically protect himself right where he is? Going somewhere to go to war, with the possibility of the extreme pain of death, maiming, injury and the emotional pain of doing the same to others, really is a stupid idea the more you understand this. You can avoid stupid things like war or any other stupid thing that hurts you. You can learn from pain to avoid problems.

The men leading you into war are manipulating you. They need you to not understand that you learn from pain to not go to war. You will go unless you understand this. That is why it is so important to them that you not understand this. It is critical to the war makers and the ones who profit from war that you not learn from pain.

How can others get you to do what they want, if what they want is not good for you because it will cause pain? They have to misdirect you. They have to convince you that a man needs to be able to handle the pain. They have to convince you that you are tough. They have to drill it into your head that you can take the pain. That if you are a man, you are built to handle it.

Then all these lessons from the manipulators get passed down to everyone else. Everyone else teaches the wrong lessons to us. This has been handed down from generation to generation. Even our own parents want us to handle the pain. We get a short pass from them when we are infants. But as soon as we are children we are admonished to take the pain, toughen up and deal with it.

You get so used to taking pain and being tough that you have no real way to know that you are supposed to learn from pain.

Only the few people who break away from these lessons and learn from pain to quit doing what is causing the pain, and do something else, have the great lives that we all should be having. They learn to improve their lives and shift their mood to better their circumstances.

There really can be no other explanation, can there?

If you are in a job you hate, it is really pain telling you to quit and do something else. Learn from pain and quit and do something else. Boredom, tedium, irritation, frustration, dread, annoyance all are forms of pain. The pain is telling you that this job is no good for you. The pain is telling you to quit and do something else.

The people who recognize this, quit and do something else, have the rewarding careers, jobs, businesses and occupations that are satisfying either emotionally or financially or probably both. This is exactly what you want because this type of work is causing you no pain. You look forward to it. You do it happily. There is no pain. You do not dread going to work. You are not bored. You are not physically drained at the end of the day. You do not dread Mondays and only look forward to Fridays.

Can you see the difference? Don't we hear over and over and over again how the people who love what they do for a living do the best financially?

What is love but the absence of pain?

If the job you are in is causing you pain, quit. Or at least make plans to quit. Look for something else. The pain is telling you to move on.

Sometimes your pain will bubble out to the surface. You will be fired because you just hate your job so much that you do poorly at it and the people above you have no choice but to fire you.

Sometimes the pain of an entire region doing things that are painful cause an entire economy to collapse. Doesn't it seem that way in this current economy? Millions of people have been laid off due to the economic conditions. But aren't the economic conditions caused by something? And isn't the something the pain of whatever it is that we are doing?

You and I cannot do much about the world, but we can do something about our situation. If you are laid off, maybe you needed to wake up and do something else. Don't look at is as bad thing. Maybe the reason you were laid off is that whatever it is that you were doing is no longer needed. Maybe it was causing too much pain to you or someone else.

I was laid off from my civil engineering job a month ago. I have been laid off for about one week each of the last 3 years. At first I thought how can you do this to me? I need the money. But then I look back at it as, you know I don't really like my job that much anyway. I do not care for it anymore. It is not me. Maybe it was never me. I never got involved in civil engineering clubs or groups. I do not like to read about civil engineering projects. I do not like to learn more about civil engineering. I do not even like civil engineers. I am interested in lots of other things different than civil engineering. It was painful to go to work. I dreaded Mondays. I watched the clock all day. I raced out the door at the end of the day. I was either bored out of my mind, frustrated with dealing with government regulations and bureaucrats, or internal staff problems, or under unbelievable pressure to get things done in a hurry. The only enjoyment was the satisfaction of doing good work.

But this type of work environment is exactly what most people learn to tolerate for years on end. Most people get up and go to work for their entire lives and do not enjoy more than a fraction of all that time. Their lives have been spent doing what they do not like, being in pain the whole time.

They have not learned from pain. They have adapted their lives to be able to take the pain.

In relationships we need to learn from pain also. The pain of bad relationships should be so easy to see, but they aren't.

Others use all kinds of manipulations to get us to stay with someone who is causing us pain.

The church says till death do you part. They say what god has wrought, let no man tear asunder. They say the two become one. This is all manipulation to get people to stay together even when being together is causing pain.

The government makes it very difficult for people to divorce. They get everything all wrapped up together as a couple. You are a couple and disentangling yourself from this is very difficult. It is a massive hassle and very expensive to leave. Why? To control you of course. They want people to stay in pain. But you have to learn from pain and do what you want, what is good for you.

The times in my life where I just endured the pain have been the worst times of my life. I have spent far too much time continuing to do things that cause me pain.

If I just look at it this way, it is so simple to see.

I hated playing basketball in high school. I dreaded the practices. I hated the games. I hated the uniforms. I got physically ill nearly every day with the dread of going. I hated all the fall waiting for basketball to start, not even enjoying the sport of football that I was fairly good at. I hated the winter because of basketball. I played in 7th, 8th, freshmen, sophomore and junior year. I never got in good shape and I never got very good at it even though I played all that time. I sprained my ankle countless times and went through the agony of that. That physical pain was telling me at the time that I should not play, but I just stoically got my ankles taped and kept going.

I finally quit just before the season started in my senior year. The coach was livid. He could not believe that I was quitting. He said think about it. But I had already thought about it when I told him. That winter without basketball was the best winter I had ever had up to that point in my life. I did not dread going to school each day. I enjoyed school for the first time in years. I had fun all the time. I even enjoyed watching the games for the first time.

I dealt with the pain of a bad marriage for years. I stayed for years even after I was in tremendous pain. The pain of being with her was telling me to leave. But I just plodded along choosing to believe the lies that a man has to stay with his wife no matter what. But I eventually left her and have never been happier. I was able to learn from the pain.

The pain caused me to write this to you. You don't need to stay in anything that is causing you pain. Once you determine what it is that is causing you pain, you need to take the steps to end whatever it is. It might be a marriage. It might be a job. It might be a relationship with family. It might be an addiction. It might be a sport or activity that someone else wants you to do, but you don't. Learn from pain and find a way to end whatever it is.

I have recently purchased a set of CD's from Dr. Robert Anthony called the Secret of Deliberate Creation. This is a fantastic program. I have been listening to it over and over again. I just have so many wrong thoughts ingrained in me that it is taking time to digest. The main idea is that you need to be happy now. That when you are happy, if you do find yourself unhappy, or in pain, you learn from pain and you would then correct that situation right then, in that moment. This continual self correction to happiness in every moment is what leads to a great life. Because you are continually self correcting every moment to get happiness, your life will never be off track.

This is so powerful. I realized that the reason I have spent so much of my life in misery, lack and pain is that I was not choosing to be happy now. I was choosing to keep doing whatever it was that was making me unhappy. Even when all the evidence showed me what I needed to do to get happy. I ignored it and did not learn from pain. I just continued on, taking the pain.

Once I injured my ankle so severely in my junior year that I went to the doctor and missed a week of practice, I still came back to the team. My physical pain was telling me to quit right then.

Once I determined that my marriage was no good I should have left my wife. I could have saved myself years of pain and misery.

Once I saw that civil engineering was not a job that I wanted to do I should have started to look for something else.

Eventually I did end all these things. I quit basketball, I left my wife, I have been laid off. I am happy now about all this. I am happy now, so I did learn from pain.

My point to you is that you do not have to learn how to deal with pain. You do not need to know how to tolerate. You are not here to take it. You only need to learn from pain. Your pain is telling you to stop doing whatever it is that is causing the pain.

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