Pain is a hard pill to swallow. So hard, in fact, that many of us will go to great lengths to avoid doing so. It’s such an unconscious decision that many of us don’t even realise we are doing it. What happens when we do this though is we create suffering and it’s actually suffering that we fear and don’t want in our lives.
Instead of actually facing the pain of an event or experience in our lives, we tend to ignore it and indulge in anything that makes us feel better. Except, they don’t actually make the problem go away and so we keep needing them in order to function and thus form dependencies. For me, food and Netflix were perhaps my biggest indulgences. The number of doughnuts I could eat in one sitting was frightening and I’ve lost count of the amount of times I have watched Full House in its entirety. It brought so much comfort to me that I even needed it on to fall asleep. I didn’t even realise how addicted I was to these things because it was so common to hear the terms binge-eating and binge-watching that I never saw it as a problem.
Admittedly, my current addiction is probably YouTube videos but at least the content there is a little broader. During my many hours on YouTube, I came across Kyle Cease and it was his videos that really highlighted this for me and actually allowed me to embrace the pain. His method is simple, just sit. Turn off all distractions, set a timer for one hour, sit upright (so you don’t fall asleep) with your eyes closed and do nothing. I know for some people just the thought of doing nothing for that length of time is unthinkable. It takes practice and discipline to do but the results are worth it. When you’re able to just sit and be with whatever feelings arise in that time, you realise that actually they are not so scary. It can be uncomfortable at times but at the end of it you feel a little lighter and you find yourself far less dependent on distractions.
Once you’ve overcome your resistance to pain, you can then learn to embrace it. That’s when the true beauty and power of pain presents itself. When you embrace the pain wholeheartedly, you can discover what it is trying to teach you. There is always a lesson and a chance to grow whenever you experience pain, that is its purpose. Once you have found the lesson you can simply let it go. I say simply, if you are anything like me letting things go is never simple. BUT, once you have faced the pain and embraced what it came to teach you then you CAN let it go and when you are able to let it go, you will no longer suffer because of it.
“The only reason we stress is something is happening that we decided should not be happening. It is not the circumstance that is the problem. It is our resistance to it.” –Kyle Cease
Alice in Welshland 