Category: Healing Not Healed

You can’t take away other people’s emotional pain.

No matter how much you love them; care for them; feel sympathy for them.

Emotional pain, like physical pain, is for the beholder to bear.

Any attempt to take away or “shoulder” another person’s emotional pain will only further delay their healing process. Because feeling is how emotional pain is released.

Be aware that you’re shouldering other people’s emotional pain when you:

• Try to fix relationship issues that aren’t yours to fix
• Have tough conversations for people that don’t involve you
• Micromanage someone’s lifestyle because “you know better”

There is no way around it; there is no “transferrable” option—the pain we’ve been dealt is the pain we have to confront.

What you can do, as a person who feels compassion for another person experiencing pain, is give them support—particularly your presence.

The same kind of support you would offer someone who got physically hurt.

You wouldn’t say: “Oh gosh! That looks like it hurts… want me to heal that pain for you?”

You’d do things more along the lines of:

• Helping remove them from painful situations (so it doesn’t get worse)
• Helping them get more comfortable/calm (so they can deal with the pain in a better state)
• Helping them get unrelated things done (so that they can have more energy for healing)

And, of course, just being present is powerful in and of itself.

This lets them know that they’re not alone to bear the weight of the pain; that it’s okay to feel and isn’t something that needs to be hidden; that they are accepted—even during their low points.

And what a true gift that can be.

Life doesn’t suddenly decide one day to stop being challenging.

Not when you’re rich. Not when you’re retired. Not when you’re on a beach.

Challenge will always be present. And with challenge comes pain.

Run from the pain? And you’ll only multiply it for later (because you’ll have to deal with the pain that comes with later PLUS the pain that you ignored).

Confront the pain—and you’ll free your future self of some of that compounding pain.

The goal is to face today’s pains today so that you can confronting new, inevitable, better pains tomorrow.

…Better pains?

Yeah, the kind of pains you’d prefer to face—that you *get* to face—because of the work you did yesterday. You know, like exercise pain versus cardiac arrest pain. Or like a hard conversation pain versus lost relationship pain.

Delay confronting pain long enough and it will eventually become unbearably painful and/or absolutely unavoidable.

Your choice.

Healing is as much a gift for us as it is for you.

Don’t ever sacrifice time to heal because you think it’ll upset people…

• “Alone time? Why do you need alone time?”
• “Why didn’t you want to hang out? You don’t like me?”
• “Journaling/Meditating/Therapy?! You don’t need that…”

It’s you feeling like you don’t have time to heal that’s causing all of the upset.

Make healing a part of your daily routine.

Why? Because pain will continue to be a part of your daily experience.

Waiting until you completely breakdown isn’t a good strategy—yet it’s what most people do.

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, eh?

Well, here’s the reality: we’re all broke. If this weren’t the case then we’d each be perfectly unbroken.

Which, of course, isn’t true.

We all have pain. And we’ll all continue to have pains—it’s one of our shared realities in life.

When our pain is left un-confronted it metastasizes—until eventually it takes over our entire experience.

It’s only when our pain is confronted (via healing practices) that it may finally fade—and eventually leave our daily experience.

P.s. I also published an article in “In Fitness And In Health:” 11 Lessons For Life From 21 Years of Martial Arts Training (8min read). I’d love it if you checked it out. :)