What If You Stopped Fighting the Pain?

I'm going to say something that may sound a little crazy.

What if the way through pain is to love it?

Not to like it. Not to want more of it. To stop treating it like an intruder and start treating it like a guest who came with a message.

Fighting makes it louder

When emotional pain shows up, most of us go to war. We push it down. We stay busy. We pour a drink, scroll for an hour, clean the whole kitchen at midnight. We tell ourselves we should be over it by now.

And the pain gets louder.

You see, pain that's resisted doesn't leave. It goes underground and comes back sideways, as anxiety, exhaustion, irritability, a body that aches for no reason anyone can find. The fight itself becomes a second layer of suffering on top of the first.

What acceptance actually looks like

Acceptance isn't giving up. It isn't saying what happened was fine. It's saying, "This is here. I'm not going to run from it."

In practice it can be as small as this:

• Sit down for five minutes and let yourself feel what's there, without a plan to fix it.
• Put a hand where it hurts, maybe on your chest or your belly, the way you'd comfort a child.
• Speak to the pain plainly. "I know you're here. You can stay a while."
• Breathe into it rather than away from it.

Something softens when we stop bracing. The pain doesn't always shrink right away. But we stop being at war with ourselves, and that alone is a relief.

Pain as a teacher

The mystics have said this for a very long time. Rumi wrote about welcoming every visitor, even sorrow, because each one may be clearing you out for some new delight. The old alchemists believed lead had to go through the fire before it could become gold.

Grief and hurt are part of that fire. They strip away what isn't true. They show us what we love. When we stop fighting, they often leave behind a deeper, quieter version of ourselves, one with more room for other people's pain, too.

None of that makes loss good. It means loss doesn't have to be the end of the story.

A simple shift

Next time the hurt rises, try turning toward it instead of away. Just for a moment. Let it be what it is.

It's only a simple shift. It can change everything that comes after.

If you'd like to understand how you, in particular, tend to grieve, take my free How Do You Grieve? quiz. And if you're ready for someone to walk alongside you, you can learn about grief coaching here.

Warmly, Carolyn