One of the things that makes us realize we are truly alive as humans is the feeling of pain. And that might sound negative, but life is always a balance of positive and negative. We know the feeling of joy and happiness because we also have to know and experience the opposite, pain.

What most people tend to do is avoid pain. I want to walk you through the idea of pain now vs. pain later. The feeling of pain can reveal and open up an awareness to your thoughts. When we work towards becoming aware of our pain, we become better at overcoming our pain. When we constantly avoid our pain and distract our minds, we tend to accumulate more pain.

You see, we can decide to choose to feel and understand the pain now, or choose to put it off until later. When we decide to push our pain until later, we continue to suffer now. When we choose to process the pain now, we can understand how to manage our emotions in the future. My coach put it like this:

“Would you rather win a million dollars or make a million dollars? And the people that say I’d rather win it, I always tell them, “But then you have no control over the next million.” If you make the million, then you can keep producing it. And that’s the same for money, but it’s also the same for mental health.”

To be clear, doing this mental work does not mean all the pain in your life will go away. It means that you will be able to process your emotions and have different thoughts that allow yourself to start healing sooner. To increase your capacity to feel pain, you increase your capacity to place yourself in more challenging or uncomfortable situations because you aren’t afraid of pain. Feeling pain now allows you to expand your life to do much more.

If you try to avoid and prevent pain, your mind will be afraid to go after new things. It will want to keep you comfortable because you don’t want to feel negative emotions. You will fall into a cycle of avoiding risk because you can’t deal with the other side. And in the end, you are causing your own pain.

The first thing to do is become aware of what your thoughts are around pain. When your body or mind is starting to show you signs of pain, do you distract yourself with doing something else to put off the pain because you don’t want to feel it now? Do you see pain as a problem? Do you only want to feel positive things, so you avoid negative emotions? Becoming aware physically as well as mentally is the first step. The next step is to ask yourself, do I want to feel pain now or avoid pain until later?

I know my answer. I want to show up in the world willing to experience pain because I know that I can overcome any emotion by managing my mind. So, I encourage you, feel the pain now and watch your life expand.

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