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Dealing with Pain:

Sometimes we will feel pain.  The only place where people live that they never experience pain is in graveyards.  We know that we will experience pain in our lives and we cannot avoid it. When we feel pain there are several routes we could take; the simplest and worst of the options is to give into that pain and let it dictate your actions and reactions. By allowing the pain to control us, we stop directing our own journeys and end up taking a path that may lead nowhere. It certainly doesn’t lead to self- improvement and growth.    There is a better option, an option that allows us to feel the pain and use it; kind of like we do in physical therapy as we are healing from injuries.   

First,  we need  is to understand where the pain is coming from. This isn’t simply identifying the source of the pain, but seeing further into where it comes from. On our journey in network marketing, a common pain that we will run into is the derision of those around us, especially from those that we love. They see the path that we have chosen and try to tear us down, put us back into the flock of humans that never strive to be better than what they have day to day. The thing that we need to do is really understand where the reactions that we get from others comes from and why they are inflicting that pain on us as we try to move into our ideal future.  So we feel pain from their judgments but why are they judging us?  

The answer is shockingly simple: they are afraid! Anything that disrupts the “normal” flow of life is something to be feared. Fear is the tool that kept us safe in caveman days and allowed us to evolve to where we are as a species today. Things outside of the normal don’t carry that same weight as they did in cave days,  they don’t have a strong likelihood of ending our lives or causing major physical damage anymore, but the fear can still be there. This is actually a very nice thing for them to do as they see it because they are trying to protect us in their own eyes.  Different and new things are scary.  In early days, anything new or different could very well be trying to eat us so we learned to fear different things.  That is why people lash out when they see us living our lives differently, they want to get things back to the normal( or what they know is safe) and ripping us off our path is the easiest way for that to happen. When we understand where their attacks come from, we can step back and understand that it isn’t actually a personal attack, we are not bad or evil in anyway, they are just thoughtlessly reacting to their own fears.

There will be pain in our lives, yet we decide how it affects us. There are a few real choices in what we can do when we feel pain. We can FREEZE!!!  We can let pain paralyze us, cause us to stop in our tracks and live in that pain.  While freezing might seem to be a good idea, it only helps short-term if at all.  freezing degrade our ability to keep moving on our path, sinking us in a quagmire that is next to impossible to free ourselves from. This is also the most common reaction to emotional pain, to do nothing about it. To just figureatively stick our heads int eh sand and hope for things to get better. Until recently this was my default for dealing with emotionally unpleasent things. I would ignore them and hope the pain would go away.  It never did. I had to actually face the pain and deal with the reason it was happening before I could stop hurting.  By freezing and ignoring the pain, we are doing the emotional equivilent of hoping a broken arm will heal itsself properly if we ignore the fact the bone is sticking out of the arm.  

Alternatively, we can give into the pain and look to mitigate it. This would be stepping away from our path in life, the path that we want for our futures and fall back into the herd that caused the pain to begin with. Trying to conform to what others want us to be so that their fear doesn’t cause them to lash out and cause us pain. Again, this does nothing to move us away from our dreams and  in fact it is the primary reason that dreams die. Why struggle to achieve our dreams when we know there will be pain? It is easier to accept the slow, chronic pain of an unfulfilled life rather than the pain of ridicule from the herd.  This would be like taking an aspirin for the broken  bone and learning to just live with the arm broken.  

The BEST choice is using pain as motivation.  FEEL the BURN!!!! We can use our pain to drive us along our path towards our dreams. We can take that pain and toss it on the fire of our passions and the let it fuel the blazing light of our dreams. This is the option that we need to embrace and make work for us. This is the option that we choose when we exercise our physical bodies, using the pain to push through the boundaries that we thought were in front of us. There is no difference when it comes to emotional pain, we have to use it to shatter the obstacles that try to define us.  This is finding the tools/doctor to set the bone properly, letting it heal and building strength slowly and steadily through physical therapy and growing stronger than we were before the break.  

Learning how to use pain to drive our internal engines and forces us to grow beyond where we are currently is a process. For me, I discovered it comes in the form of writing.  This is the fuel gets me to put fingers to keyboard and to forcefully grasp my dreams and my future and drive them forward. How do you use the pain you feel to better your life? I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

-Dominic