6 Steps To Turn Suffering Into Learning

Pain is a part of life just like joy and pleasure. We tend to think that it is a fatal accident, the whim of fate, but it is nothing more than an extension of our existence. We can therefore not avoid it. Every effort to try to do this will be exhausting and useless.

Pain, just like happiness, brings us closer to our essence.  Both pain and happiness give us important lessons, and they also guide the steps in our lives.

But many times we turn pain into suffering, and we get a bitter taste in our mouth that persists in a strange way. And we are the ones who suffer the most… because it is somehow as if we are desperately looking for even more suffering than what already exists.

Suffering is an addition to the pain, not the pain itself

It is not bad or negative to feel nostalgia. It is also not wrong to want to spend some time alone with your pain. In fact, it is sometimes necessary to have these moments. Have that cup of coffee with you. That encounter with your humanity.

The most worrying part is that all the weight we put on ourselves when we climb up that steep mountain is often something we choose for ourselves. This creates even more suffering than we already feel. We put extra emphasis when we, for example, say that this sadness will last forever. That it is not limited, that we are bound by its will.

To turn our pain into a lesson

But there is good news: we can put an end to this extra suffering, and we can even turn it into a lesson that will increase our existential wisdom exponentially .

How? Psychologist Jose Antonio Garcia-Monge explained it in one of his books. He said that when someone has gone through a personal process that many restless minds have traveled through, the person reaches a level of wisdom that allows him to prove over and over again that he is a human being and can not be separated from the act of living. Suffering is an invention that we add, and that we can simply get rid of.

We must recognize that

We must identify our suffering. Know if it is a pain that affects us in a mental, physical, social or existential way… There are different types and we must be able to recognize them. We must stare it in the white eye and stop with this suffering for a while. Stay in that special meeting we talked about earlier.

Maintain an honest dialogue with it

To begin a dialogue with your suffering, you must be clear about one thing. The pain warns us that something is not right. Something interrupts our mental peace. We must therefore understand what that pain comes from and why it occurs.

By answering these questions, we will have already achieved something great. But to do that, you have to be honest and listen to what your pain wants to say to you. You will not do yourself a favor if you run away from it or listen to it half-heartedly. You must listen to it with all your senses and with the greatest possible honesty because the pain opens us completely.

Do not turn pain into suffering

As Garcia-Monge puts it, “Pain can burn a part of our body. Sufferers have the ability to destroy an entire individual. ” This is a true phrase… suffering has the ability to completely block your mind and therefore make you unable to do anything.

We turn our pain into suffering the moment we project it into time. We give it an infinite duration. We also magnify it with catastrophic messages that we send to ourselves, messages without hope.

Take responsibility for the pain

This does not mean that you blame yourself. Feelings of guilt will not give you peace, but will instead make it go up in smoke. Taking responsibility for our pain implies that we realize what we are doing to increase it. To make it grow and grow so that a gentle current turns into a river.

How can I help myself or how can I ask for help to handle it in the best way? Transferring my responsibility to others is, once again, a useless practice that will ultimately create even more pain. In fact, it is one of the most short-lived scams.

Free yourself from the pain without changing its place

With the previous steps, we have already achieved a lot. The previous steps give you peace, which we can not find when we postpone our meeting with the pain over and over again. We need to face it face to face.

Maybe I can appease it with something that will help me and something that will anchor me to life. Each person is unique and knows what can help them and what can not. There are no solutions that are equally effective for everyone. There is no magic that fixes everything. It is a process of living.

Mature because of it (or despite it)

“Know existentially that you are greater than your own pain ,” Garcia-Monge said. Being greater than our pain implies that we accept that we are NOT our pain, not fully.

We are more than our pain. This implies that we have very powerful resources that we must discover and use in order to help us in difficult transformations. One who is tough but human, who goes from pain to learning.

So to all the people who are going through a tough time, I would now recommend that you listen to yourselves with the honesty that this requires. I invite you to accept what is yours and not someone else’s, and that you hug yourself. At the end of the day, this is a learning process in life.