Sometimes Pain is a Pebble: Frameworks for Successfully Being with Pain
In the Drop In Meditation that we practice in Groundwork, Amrita says, “see your pain as if it is a rock, turning to sand in your hand, moving through your experience”.
After engaging with and teaching this work for over a year now, I’ve been learning a lot about the subtleties of pain, and there’s a few secrets I’d like to share with you.
- Sometimes pain is a pebble, and sometimes it's a mountain. On some drop ins, you’ll be able to feel all there is and reach a state of completion, other times you will only be able to take a scoop out of that mountain, and need to return many times to finally move it through your experience. Each pain is unique.
- Each pain is finite. In Hindu philosophy, stored patterns of pain are called samskaras. Eckhart Tolle says each pain makes up a collective pain body. By any name, unprocessed pain continues to live in our bodies until we are able to feel it all. We may have to drop in multiple times, or just once, depending on how big and impactful the pain was, but each pain does have an end. Remember: feelings want to be visitors, not permanent guests. What was once stored, now must be felt to be free.
- Resist judging the size of your pain. When you’ve met the same pain many times, it can feel frustrating to see it triggered again. We don’t like discomfort; we don’t want to feel painful things. But going to meet our pain when we recognize we are in avoidance or overwhelm is, ironically, the shortest path to getting out of it. Each time you meet your pain, you will be able to recognize it sooner, feel more comfortable in its landscape, and lengthen the gap between reaction and action. Adding judgement to this process only adds another layer of resistance that doesn’t serve us in staying in the most efficient state of being—nonresistance.
Why meet your pain at all? If you have unprocessed and unconscious pain, then on some level it is running you from the shadows and dictating how you live your life—likely not for the best. To carry unconscious pain is to be in a state of resistance, as on some level, we are avoiding feeling that pain. Fighting against or ignoring reality uses a lot of energy that we could be applying to creating, loving, enjoying, enacting, being.
I was working with a client who had big pain around being unseen, and it led her to start a side business she had no time for while she was finishing her medical degree. We traced this back and realized she was acting solely from her pain, from her unmet need to be recognized. Pain can rule your life from the shadows if you do not examine it.
As I do this work and feel my pain, I find more and more energy naturally becomes available to me. I am able to be with more of my pain and on deeper levels; I am able to be with more of myself. I recognize sooner when I am acting from pain, versus a centered place, and it has had massive benefits in all areas of my life. Feeling your pain, being in nonresistance, is the most efficient and powerful state available to all of us.
––Olivia Fromm, Groundwork Executive Coach
The Groundwork System is a simple way to manage your inbox, to-do list, and calendar, and a simple way to understand and manage the triggers and pain that keep you in survival mode.
