The Purpose in Your Pain 

Your pain has a purpose.

To resist or avoid the depths of pain is to turn away from the most authentic parts of your soul. To close the beautiful tapestry that provides a window into who you are.

This is because inside of pain lies a vulnerable space where your values make a home and the things you love reside. Pain is an organic compass there to provide guidance towards the path of a live worth living.

The roots of pain are made from the seeds of your deepest desires and yearnings. To cut these roots or pull them from the earth, you must also forget who you are and what means something to you. To be truly rid of pain, you must not care about the things that hurt. You must begin the journey of un-knowing yourself.

For example, if you want to throw away the feeling of rejection – you must also throw away your yearning for what makes a meaningful connection and your caring about the types of relationships you desire. The two are intimately intertwined.

Is this really worth it? To give up what’s important and deeply part of you in order to escape the feeling of pain?

Or, are you willing to embrace your pain and allow these seeds to make their home, knowing there is a purpose hidden within the very things that hurt the most?

This is a beautiful and necessary paradox. Pain is connected and embedded with who we are. Thus, as we respond to our pain, we have to shift away from the idea that the goal is the feel better and into the understanding that the goal is to get better at feeling. We must be willing to understand that in order to nurture our truth, we have to commit to being with our pain. We must realize that trying to protect ourselves from pain requires a sort of self-abandonment that silences the whispers of our soul. These whispers are important and desire us to hear them – so what if we stopped and listened? What if we opened up to the fullness of our experience as it is, instead of trying to carve out only the pieces we want? Perhaps we would be more willing to move towards the things that we want, even if it meant we had to carry pain, too. Because we see pain for what it is – a signal of our humanity meant to be carried with us as a part of our experience and not the the experience we have to avoid. How freeing it would be, to know that a valuable existence is not the absence of pain. But rather, the ability to accept pain and the purpose it has.

So, I wonder, where in your life can you open up to pain, so that you may begin to unravel the valuable threads that trace back to the life you yearn for most?