Earth can be a dense, heavy planet and each of us comes to know pain in our time here. Pain can be excruciating, but is vital for our world’s evolution and our own. Allowing adequate time to feel our pain thoroughly and take care of ourselves is also vital. Pain provides us with a direct route forward for success when we are ready. Pain isn’t going anywhere, so take advantage of the opportunities pain presents instead of being consumed.
Listed below are five techniques everyone can utilize to harness their pain as fuel for their success.
- Accept your pain as it is, without trying to change it
This is the hardest part for me, personally. Often in the spiritual community, we are nudged to focus solely on the positive, only giving attention to what we want to feel, not what we are feeling. However, ignoring what you’re feeling can be dangerous, creating a sense of abandonment within yourself and pushing the emotion deeper in your body, permitting the feelings to arise at inopportune moments.
Below are some tips to help you feel your emotions thoroughly
- Toxic positivity tries to prevent us from feeling negative emotions, but they are necessary for our growth. Remembering that we chose to live and feel the wide range of every emotion helps them exist without judgement
- Know that resisting your feelings only feeds your self- doubt. Allowing yourself to feel what naturally arises for you establishes emotional support.
Some options to tell yourself when engaging with difficult feelings are:
- “I am feeling a lot of pain right now, and it’s okay to feel that way.”
- “My pain is valid.” (my personal favorite)
- “I allow myself to acknowledge and feel this pain, knowing that it is serving a purpose for me.”
- “This pain is not enjoyable to experience, but I allow myself to experience it, knowing it will be released when I am ready.”
- “I am here to support myself during these difficult feelings, trusting that I have my own back.”
Feeling and releasing our emotions allows for a more open and balanced energetic state, leaving us clear-headed and in-tune with our needs, which is essential for our success.
- Prioritize caring for your needs, the way you would care for a loved one
Waiting for other people or external forces to heal our pain is a disservice to ourselves. Leaning on a support system is a great resource, but we are responsible for managing our nervous systems and finding healing. It can take a while to understand this, but it is absolutely vital for our success.
Focus on taking the best possible care of yourself while you are in the midst of your pain. Imagine the ways you look after loved ones when they need support, and exceed these steps for yourself.
Below are some examples of the ways you can look after your needs in the midst of pain.
- Spoil yourself with activities/things that you love (ex. Comfort movies, favorite snacks, reading, nature walks, sleep, deep rest, candles, aromatherapy)
- Write completely unfiltered in a journal
- Take a long bath and feel your heart becoming warmer
- Make yourself a nutrient-dense meal
- Be patient with yourself, understanding that healing takes time
- Make yourself laugh (ex. Watch a comedy special, watch videos that make you laugh, talk on the phone with the funniest person you know)
- Spend time with people who make you feel loved and supported
- Focus on what you need in each moment, knowing that your comfort is the priority
Strengthening your relationship to yourself solidifies the foundation that everyone needs in order to be successful. Treating yourself with compassion translates to how you treat those around you, how you view life obstacles, and how present you are for yourself. When you have a better relationship with yourself, you are a better parent, friend, employee, boss, and person.
- Express your pain
Bottling our emotions, telling everyone around us we’re “fine,” and seeking immediate gratification all contribute to pain festering inside of us, influencing our subconscious to believe that we are unworthy of success. Expressing our pain is possibly the most important technique to transmute pain into progress because, when we express our pain, we experience an emotional release and gain validation, support, and increased self-awareness.
Below are some methods to express your pain:
- Confide in a trusted person. (Asking if the person has the emotional capacity to hear what you are going through can ensure the person consents to the conversation and fully engages in active listening)
- Speaking with a counselor or therapist
- Writing (journaling, poetry, free writing, automatic writing)
- Creative Expression (art, music, crafts, collages, cooking/baking)
- Musical Expression (create music, make playlists based on the emotion you’re feeling, search for a song that embodies your experience)
- Physical expression (dancing, walking, boxing, yoga, somatic stretches)
- Emotional release (lay in the fetal position, cry, scream)
- Somatic movements (literally throw a tantrum! Let yourself scream, stomp, roll on the floor, and shake until you become tired. Then, eat a snack and take a nap.)
By expressing our pain physically and emotionally, we make space for healing to replace pain. We all feel pain differently and we all express it differently, so find what works for you, try different methods, and mix and match modalities.
- Reframe your perspective regarding your pain
Viewing the situations that bring us pain as punishment or spiraling into a victim-complex can be damaging to our self-concept, which negatively impacts our ability to be successful. Although it may be difficult to find in the moment, every setback, failure, and obstacle we face contains an important lesson. Finding the lesson can change your perspective from a solely painful experience to an opportunity to grow and learn.
Below are tips to help you begin to reframe pain
- Notice if you fall into a victim mindset. Thoughts like “Why me?” or “Of course this would happen to me,” are not helpful, and are simply untrue. Pain is universal and is not directed at anyone in particular. Reinforcing the belief that you are always in painful situations is only going to make you notice these instances even more.
- Shift from, “Why me?” to “What is this trying to show/teach me?”
- Our pain may be highlighting an area of our life that is impeding our success. In this sense, your pain is actually trying to help you notice and improve the ways you hold yourself back in order to make you more successful. Pain has some interesting methods, but it has our best interest at heart. This may be difficult in the midst of the painful experience, but after a few days of taking care of yourself, you may feel your mind clear and settle, which indicates an opportune time to try this reframing method.
An example of this mindset shift is as follows:
I am feeling emotional pain due to being rejected by someone I really liked.
Victim-mindset: “Of course they didn’t like me, the people I like never reciprocate my feelings. Why is this happening to me?”
Growth-mindset: “I’m feeling hurt that the person I really like rejected me, and it’s okay to feel disappointed, but my pain is showing me how much external validation I rely on for my self-worth. I see how my insecurities impact me and I understand that I am capable of improving this within myself. I appreciate being given the opportunity to grow in my self-concept so that no one accepting or rejecting me can change my emotional state.”
Finding a lesson or silver lining from our pain can help us understand why it has shown up in the first place. It is so easy to fall into a victim mindset, especially when painful events seem to be a repeating cycle in our lives. However, these cyclical patterns are trying to signal a limiting belief that we have about ourselves that is holding us back. In the above example, constantly being rejected by those you like may indicate that you believe you are unworthy. You are worthy, of course, but in your subconscious mind, you do not believe so. These painful patterns show up to make us question what’s going on and realize changes we need to make in our foundational beliefs. Our pain wants to help us be more successful, and reframing is an effective technique to overcome our pain and use it as fuel for motivation.
- Let your pain propel you forward
Pain can be channeled into our sense of purpose, passions, and desires to impact others. True success is built on a strong foundation of authentic passion. If you genuinely care about your work, you will be inspired to work harder for it and be more successful with it. Since pain can be extremely intense, it can also propel us very far distances. Like a slingshot, pain pulls us back, increasing potential energy and, once we’re ready, we can make the conscious choice to let our pain propel us and, RELEASE! We finally let go, and we are catapulted forward.
Below are some techniques to release from pain and watch yourself soar:
- Let pain’s teachings inspire you to make decisions that improve your life
- Ex. I feel abandoned by those around me, so I decide to work on my self-concept and form union with myself
- Use your pain to inform and support others going through similar pain, leading to a deeper life purpose
- Ex. start a community group centered around your pain and helping each other heal
- Set goals ranging from your wildest dreams to easily achievable goals and celebrating all your progress
- Acknowledge your strength and be appreciative of your resilience
- Practice gratitude even in the midst of your pain
- Ex. I am feeling hurt by my relationships, but I am thankful that I have a reliable job and close friends to help me through it.
- Focus on empowerment and passion
- Use your pain as an excuse to start a project you’ve been too scared to start. If you can endure pain, you have the strength to follow your heart
Making the decision to use pain as fuel for a more motivated, determined, and compassionate life will contribute to your success. Successful people endure just as much pain, setbacks, and failure as everyone else, they just have a different perspective when enduring it.
So, take care of yourself, feel and express your pain, try out reframing and, ultimately, make your pain your success.
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