Learn from Pain

Pain is trying to teach you a lesson. If you learn from pain your life will get better.

If you keep on ignoring the pain, rubbing dirt on it, dealing with it and taking it like a man, your life will never get better.

You will have no life.

The only thing you will have is an ability to take pain.

Pain is trying to nudge you or push you in a different direction.  If you don't realize it, and do not act on it, 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.

Learn from Pain

What happens if you get hurt doing something?

You quit doing the whatever it is you are doing immediately and do something else to relieve the pain.

You realize it would be stupid not to.

You're playing a sport and get injured.  Don't you stop what you are doing?

Why?

Isn't the pain 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 any type of pain in this way, it is so simple.

When you experience pain it is 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 take the 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?

Some people understand how we are supposed to learn from pain and that is the reason some people have fabulous lives of wealth, abundance, prosperity, romance, love and joy.

The people who learn from pain get it.

But most people have none of those things.

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

  • Be a man
  • Be tough
  • Endure
  • 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.

From Bob Wells at CheapRVLiving.com

Are You Hibernating Through Life

I love his articles that force you to re-evaluate how you think.  He has a number of articles getting deep into the philosophy of spending most of your time doing what you love, rather than most of your time doing what you hate.  Living in a van allows him to do that.

As I read an article like this it reminds me how critical it is for you and I to care deeply about our own lives.

Pain of Being Manipulated into doing something stupid

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 is the stupidest thing a man can do.

You can avoid stupid things like war or any other stupid thing that hurts you.

You can learn from pain to avoid problems.

Those 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 war profiteers 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.  Crying ourselves to sleep, being spanked, yelled at, ignored and admonished at every turn.

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.

Pain on the Job

If you are in a job you hate, the pain of hating your job is 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?

This is a larger issue that I would like to explore in the future.  Millions of people subsisting in poor conditions on government handouts seems like a painful situation to me.

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 had been laid off from my former civil engineering job a number of times.

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 did not really enjoy that job anymore. I do not care for it anymore. It is not me.

Maybe it was never me. 

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.

Then when the economy recessed, there was the fear causing pain of how to survive during a layoff.

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.

Relationship Pain

In relationships we need to learn from pain also. This is the kind of pain that will easily ruin you.  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
  • What god has wrought, let no man tear asunder
  • The two become one.

This is propaganda and manipulation to coerce people to stay together even when being together is causing pain.

The government makes it very difficult for people to divorced.

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?Why should the government care?

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.

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.

Pain of Doing Something You Don't Want to Do

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 excelled at.

I hated the winter because of basketball.

I played in 7th, 8th, freshmen, sophomore and junior year. I never got in good basketball 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 with rage. He could not believe that I was quitting. Quitting was not something that people did, especially high school kids who have been pushed into all kinds of things they do not want to do.

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.

Learn From Pain - My Lessons

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.

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.

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.

My ankle injury and anxiety from basketball was telling me to quit basketball.

The misery of my marriage was telling me to leave her.

The frustration and stagnation at my last job was telling me to find something different.

Eventually I did end all these things. I quit basketball, I left my wife, I found a better job.

And I am happy now about all this. I did learn from pain.

You Do Not

  • Have to learn how to deal with pain
  • Need to know how to tolerate
  • Have to take it

You only need to use your pain to determine what to do.

› › Learn From Pain

The only way I could become the happier man I am today was by leaving my wife.  You might be in the same situation I was in.  I suggest you take a look at my book - Leave Your Wife & Become a Happier Man with the 3 Step System.

Click to go to learn more about the book

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