Pain…I welcome you.
My stomach turned, my hands were shaking, I was feeling tense, uncertain and broken. “What should I do now?” I thought to myself while tears continued to run down my cheeks…
After a long time feeling like I was not good enough, not pretty enough not smart enough, but always being too afraid to do something about it, I ended my relationship, and it felt like my whole world fell apart and I couldn't do anything about it. At that moment my mind was intertwined, I was being tossed back and forth, thinking “should I stay, should I leave…, what should I do."
Life does this so well you know. Giving us just the right situation, sometimes it’s losing our relationships other times we lose our jobs, or we lose a loved one… Practically ripping our souls apart and leaving us stripped, with nothing but feeling unbearable pain… And we don’t even come close to knowing what we should do next…
You know why?
Because as beautiful and simple human beings, we find our self partaking in a twisted culture where everyone is expected to have happy, shiny feelings all the time. So typically when I was at my worst, I looked at all the happy people posting their happy photos and videos of their perfect lives on Facebook and Instagram, and I thought to myself: “How is it that I’m not happy and everyone else around me is? There must be something really really wrong with me”
And isn’t this what we all do? When faced with failure, defeat, loss, pain, we often think that there is something substantially wrong with us. We think we are dysfunctional and abnormal.
Naturally, we try to hide our pain, we try to trick ourselves into thinking we are happy and even worse we try to run away from our pain…
When crisis comes, when betrayal comes, when loss comes, we run. We run towards food, shopping, alcohol, drugs, sex. We paralyze ourselves in order to escape our pain. One thing that specifically paralyzes us nowadays is our phone. The moment we feel sad or alone we quickly reach for our phones, and we go on Facebook, we go on Instagram, and we go on Snapchat. Society has made it so easy for us, just one touch of a button and we feel so much better.
The problem is when we carry our self out of our pain into a easy place, we miss out on our growth, because everything that we need to become, is in the pain that we are feeling right now.
As said by Glennan Doyle: "Pain is actually a traveling professor, knocking on everybody’s door."
However only the wisest take a deep breath and say...: “Come in..., Sit down and DON'T leave until you’ve taught me what I need to know.”
We have had it all wrong you see. We are made for Pain, but so many of us are afraid of feeling pain. But what we actually should be afraid of is, choosing the easy way out
When we look at some of the greatest spiritual teachers who we so often read and talk about:
Buddha, whose father tried to protect him from all suffering, had to leave and experience all of it before he could find enlightenment. Or on the night before the crucifixion, when Peter figured out what was about to happen, and told Jesus that he was going to be killed the next day. So he goes up to Jesus and says let’s just run, let’s get out of here, suggesting to Jesus to choose the easy way out. Where Jesus replied No, get behind me. This pain was meant for me.
So dearest beautiful soul, I will not be the first one and surely I won’t be the last, to tell you that we need our pain.
As first, we suffer.
And then my dear friend...
We Rise…
Author: Roshni Jagroep
References: "The love warrior" by Glennon Doyle