Pain is Only What you Make It - The Original Tale

Reference previous post: The Pain is Only What you Make It - Mind over Matter

With every impact, blood seeped out of my aching knuckles as I struck the wall-mounted training pad over …and over …and over again. Right, left, right left, right, left… My senior instructor, in his naturally menacing manner bellowed, “Punch harder!! I better feel the building shake! The pain is only what you make it.” as he walked out of the dojo and went upstairs to eat his lunch…

There were two of us testing for our black belts that day and we both took a healthy breath, focused in a little closer to our targets …and we punched harder. As our fists throbbed and knuckles stung, his words resounded in ears, and we persevered. My mind sunk into contemplation and became detached from my current situation. After many years of martial arts training, I knew the capabilities of my body, and I knew how it would react to certain types of damage. “They’re only knuckles. They’ll lose their skin and bleed. Since I’m human I know they’ll heal.”

“If the pain is only what I make it, then the fact that I’m stuck in this situation is unimportant.”

Physical pain is only a response to outside stimuli, and it tells a brain that there may be damage occurring at a certain location on the body. Essentially, it’s an electrical memo sent from your nerve endings to your brain and can be thought of as merely a form of communication. Well, if you are already aware of what is happening with your body, then you have no reason to read the memo. You have the option to disregard the memo in order to more effectively get your task done. Of course, the same philosophy can be applied to more than just the physical sort of pain or suffering.

“I know that I am in pain now, but I know that some time in the future I will no longer be in pain.”

Knowing that pain is temporary is also helpful. When you begin to realize that the climate of life is always changing, then you will always be prepared to embrace the approaching climate, be it painful or joyful. If this is the case, what difference does it make that there is pain now?

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One Second Meditation Practice. A Moment of Clarity.

Image by KayVee.INC via Flickr

One-hour meditation too much to handle? 20 minutes? 5 minutes got you beat? Here's a new approach to meditation with one very westernized quality about it. It's very fast.

This method is less focused on meditation, but more about trying to sit peacefully and achieve a brief moment of clarity, or clarity of presence. This way of thinking comes from Zen philosophy. The idea here is to create an instantaneous state of mind, or state of being wherein your awareness or understanding of your immediate surroundings or situation is increased. Try not to exert effort when attempting this. It will inevitably lead to failure and regret. Failure to do something that you didn’t “try” to do, is not really a failure. If you want it to be a sunny day and it turns out rainy, you did not fail. If it rains, it rains; if it’s sunny, it’s sunny.

Hints to help you achieve a moment of clarity:

1. Focus on your heartbeat until you can feel it pushing the blood throughout all of your arteries.
2. Create a phrase or sentence that describes what it feels like to be alive.
3. Look at your hand and try to understand that no matter what happens in this life, all that's sure is that you will have this body.
4. Picture yourself from a bird's eye view. Visualize whatever you're doing at the moment and zoom out little by little to picture the room, building, trees, street, town, state, country, continent, planet, galaxy, and all of the cosmos.
5. Imagine you have just been born and are seeing all of the things around you for the first time.
6. Do not concentrate, just pay attention.
7. Do something you absolutely love doing. Something that engages your mind and body 100%.
8. Rise to a challenge that is slightly more than you think you are capable of.
9. Breathe silently and listen to the other sounds your body may be making.
10. Focus on your skin until it begins to tingle.

Have a nice day!

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How to Prioritize when Prioritizing is not a Priority

Everyone has something that they want to accomplish or get better at or do more often, and no matter how much we think about it, it just keeps slipping by. Another opportunity to eat healthier or practice a certain piano piece, etc. is trumped by other priorities, other obligations.

Accept that this will happen.

You have priorities. Everyone does, and always will, that’s just part of human nature. Priorities that are higher on the list get done before those that are lower. Sometimes you have control over the priorities list and sometimes you don’t. Priorities come bundled with an inherent level of importance depending on your lifestyle and the elements you cherish.

Increasing the importance of a priority.

If you have something in mind that you have wanted to undertake, but have not been able to find the time for it, there is a way to increase the importance. Generally speaking the items that are a "bigger" part of your life get more attention - the house, kids, job, etc. So with this philosophy, if you make something a larger part of your life, it will inherently become more of a priority.

Make your priorities a hobby!

If you make something a hobby it will become more important to you because of the fact that it has become a larger part of your life. My wife recently became fascinated with eating healthy. She fed that fascination by learning about food from the bottom up. She studied hundreds of healthy foods, read books, blogs, labels and talked to other people with similar minds. She became immersed in this knowledge and has gained an invaluable understanding of what is healthy and why . She made this lower-level priority into a hobby that expanded and consumed spare moments that would otherwise have been used doing other things. Her other priorities didn’t necessarily have to wane to make room for it, but they were simply rearranged to accomodate for it.

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