Pain is a Teacher, Not an Identity

My kindergarten class making the shape of our world on Earth day circa 2013.

Pain has been my greatest teacher. I consider now a friend. Pain is physical and pain is emotional in shame, guilt, anger, fear and even grief. Pain is a feeling that promotes violence, lack of responsibility, and lack of accountability when its lessons are ignored. We are seeing so much of it expressed in our world and even in our own selves.

We all have pain. The louder the pain. The louder the actions are. We are seeing and hearing about pain at a very loud level that it refuses to continue to be ignored.

We hold onto pain that isn't ours. We hold onto painful thoughts and beliefs that didn't come from us, but what we absorbed. These painful thoughts have been repeated so many times that they have become beliefs. Beliefs are just thoughts we have repeated many times or heard many times and have taken them on as our own, they color how we view the world. Thoughts that have become beliefs holding in our body as Truth to our identity.

We mistake places where we hold pain within ourselves as "who we are". We are not our pain. Pain is a teacher. It wants us and needs us to learn from it.

Learning from pain becomes your peace. Pain teaches you how to love yourself and others in profound depth. Pain allows us to feel joy. When you numb pain you numb all its teachings of peace, love and joy.

We all need to learn how to listen to the pain inside of us. We all need safe places and people who have the capacity to guide others in shifting this pain to the lesson, the peace it is meant to become.

This is hard work, learning from pain. We must hear it out loud, validate it ourself, honor it for the lesson it teaches about ourself or how we have been holding the pain of another, and let it go with physical movement otherwise it stays stuck in our body and continue to wreck havoc on our mind and body.

Learning from pain is the work we must do. Every adult must do their own work to release pain, and the work of guiding our children in this process. No child knows how to do this or can do this themself. This is the work we must do to experience more peace, love, and joy.

This is the work we must teach our children, if they are to live longer and a better life than us.

Find a way to move through your own pain. Because what we don't move through we give. And we give our pain the most to our children. It's why our children currently have a lower life expectancy than we do.

Harvard Health Publishing states average life expectancy "..in the US; it was 47 years in 1900, 68 years in 1950, and by 2019 it topped at 79 years. But it fell to 77 in 2020 and dropped even further in 2021 to 76. That's the largest decrease in over a two-year span since the 1920s."

Guns, drugs, and suicide are all fueled by the lack of ability to move through pain. Guns, drugs, and suicide are what is taking our future. Guns, drugs, and suicide are the top contributors to the death of our children today.

If we want to do better, then we have to find ways to move through pain. We can't keep dismissing it and numbing it out, it just gets louder. We have to learn to work with our pain so we can live a better life. And more importantly learn to work with pain so we can give a better life to others.

Find people who have mastered how to move through pain. I am one of them. Therapy with someone who is experienced and licensed with working with trauma. Trainings on working with trauma. Books written on how trauma affects you. You can start reading books listed here. Find the education and work with them, learn from them, and move out the pain that is making you suffer and those around you suffer.

You and I were not put on this planet to live like this, we are here to learn, heal, and grow from this so we can live in more peace, love, a joy. Let's do the work together to get there.