No pain, no gain.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

Pain is a natural and very important part of life. Without pain, we would not know pleasure. Without pain, we would not have nearly as long a longevity as we do now. We would not know not to stick our hands in the dancing flames of fire.

Pain causes fear, panic, discomfort, anxiety, depression and so much more. So how then can it also make us stronger? Because pain also teaches us lessons and gives us new skills, if we are open to accepting them.

Think of the first time you rode a bike. Did you manage to stay on and ride around the block, or did you fall and scrape your knees? Chances are you fell a multitude of times before finding your balance. Once you were able to ride your bike, you gained coordination skills, balance, you were given freedom to ride your bike over to a friends. It possibly even developed into further skills and pastimes, such as mountain biking or BMX biking.

You can apply the same thinking to emotional pain. Think of your first love. You likely got hurt, but learned from that pain. When the relationship ended, you learned what kind of person you don’t want to be with, which traits or attitudes you don’t mesh with. Perhaps if you were cheated on, you learned what signs to look out for so it does not happen again.

You may ask yourself, “my mom past away, where is the lesson in that”? Perhaps you had to take over some of her duties and thus learn time management. You may have chronic pain and wonder where the lesson is there. Maybe that pain is there to help teach you to find pleasure in the small things.

Pain is there to teach us lessons and our job is to recognize that lesson and apply it to our everyday lives. Sometimes these lessons are simple, like fire = hot, and other times it requires deep soul searching, but the lesson is there. It is only once you have learned this lesson that the pain begins to disappear, because you no longer associate with the pain but instead associate pleasure to the new skill or lesson. With that, I leave you with a quote from Rumi, as I could not say it better myself.