The Counterintuitive Method For Dealing With Pain

Learned The Hard Way

Read time: 2 mins

Welcome to The Brain and Body Warrior.

A blueprint of lived lesson to help you understand your brain, conquer your body and develop your warrior mindset.

On today’s menu: The counterintuitive way to deal with pain.

The Warrior

“Pain will leave you when it’s done teaching you.” - Bruce Lee

I ignored it for years.

For almost a decade, in fact.

The pain.

The pain that my own thoughts were causing me. The tension. The anxiety. The fear.

My brain was screaming at me, trying to tell me, in its own idiosyncratic and idiotic way, there was something I needed to learn.

And I did nothing about it.

Instead I chose a path of resistance. Because that's what came naturally.

The problem is, as the saying goes, what you resist, persists.

The harder I pushed back, the worse things got, and the more the weight of my inner world threaten to completely collapse on top of me.

I know I'm not alone in this.

As I said, aversion to pain and discomfort comes naturally to us as a species. We are wired that way, and for good reason.

The problem is that, when it comes to our inner world, a strategy of resistance, of pushing back or trying to push things away, simply doesn’t work. In fact, it’s like pouring gasoline on an already out of control fire.

Bad idea.

I know. I tried it for years.

That was, until I tried something else.

I started asking questions, to try to understand why my brain was “acting out”. What did it all mean?

Slowly, as I drew back the veil of my inner world, I discovered that all the turmoil was simply my brain’s way of trying to teach me something.

So I listened.

And I learned.

That’s when I realized something miraculous:

The pain left.

The thoughts, the tension, the anxiety and fear left as well.

Having finally got through to me, my brain let up, and let me move forward, confident that I had finally learned the lessons it knew I needed to grow.

By working with it, instead of resisting it, I found my way through to the other side.

It’s counterintuitive, and especially hard in this modern age where it’s easier than ever to simply numb the pain of our inner world with endless distractions, but we cannot ignore our unpleasant feelings and thoughts.

Instead, we need to listen to them, to acknowledge the discomfort of the pain we feel, but not get caught up in them. To learn to sit with them.

This way, we can begin to unravel what our pain needs to teach us, so it can leave.

Is it easy? No. Does it take time? Yes.

But it’s a better alternative than living your life in pain because you refuse to acknowledge that there’s things you need to learn.

As a starting point, try simply asking yourself:

Why do I feel or think the way that I do? What might my brain or body trying be trying to teach me?

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