Tag: pain is a gift

Watching the People You Love Ruin Their Lives

You love them with all your heart, yet they make choices and decisions that bring discomfort, despair, and chaos into their life. There’s little worse than watching the people you love ruin their lives. You want to help. You give your input and suggestions, still, they insist on being their own worst enemy.

It breaks your heart every time they do it, yet you cannot prevent them from exercising their own free will and living the life they were meant to live.

What? “the life they were meant to live?” That’s right. Everyone is on their own individual journey. Each one is different and different people are destined to have different experiences, in a sense to play out the hand they were dealt in such a way to get them where their life’s journey leads.

You know, in your life, you’ve made bad decisions which have led to uncomfortable consequences. But didn’t you learn from those experiences? Weren’t there critical pivot points in your life which made you evaluate your decision-making process, change your life, and make better decisions in the future?

This is the process, and you can’t do it for anyone else. This may make you feel like you’re watching the people you love ruin their lives, but you’re not. You are not watching them ruin their lives, what you’re doing is watching the people you love make their own way through life, just as you’re making your own way through yours.

We’ve all learned key values based on our individual experiences, such as being a people pleaser or keeping up with the Joneses. Taking the easy way out, procrastination, giving up too soon or holding on too long. Asserting your superiority or not valuing others. You know all the right answers and everyone else is wrong. Not speaking your peace, or not being open to new ideas.

You know from your own experience that it’s not a good thing to bury the past and ignore it, to judge others harshly, to engage in hate speech, to think that what you want is all that matters, or to hold onto expectations so tightly that if something doesn’t go your way, your whole world collapses.

You’ve learned valuable life lessons, like having a bad experience doesn’t mean that everything associated with a similar focal point of your bad experience (stocks, cars, investments, mate choice, religion, social cliques, pets, children, relatives, etc.) is patently also potentially “bad.” You know better to throw the baby out with the bathwater. You’ve learned this over time.

You know if you feel like you can’t do it, you probably can. You’ve learned to be open to new ideas because you might end up making your own life easier or better. You’ve discovered that cutting yourself some slack, not judging yourself harshly, and taking time to relax and smell the roses are not only beneficial but necessary for living a good life.

You’ve learned that not all advice from people you care for and trust is not always the best advice.

Failure is not fatal. If you fall off the horse, you dust yourself off and get ready to give it another go. You’ve learned that you cannot give to others or love with all your heart if your cup is empty.

You’ve learned to graciously accept assistance if someone offers to lend a hand, and to avoid being seen as narcissistic by others.

You’ve learned to accept others as they are, where they are on their own individual journey. You love them, you let you make their own way, and you bless them as they learn from their own experiences.

Many of the most valuable lessons in life are learned by living life, by making mistakes, and learning from them. Why would you deny anyone that part of their journey?

The people you love have to find and make their own way, to discover all these things on their own. You may share your own story as an interesting anecdote, but do not preach to nor condemn them for having the courage to make their own decisions, and do not coddle them when they suffer the consequences.

This is their life. Honor them.

Yes, it can be hard to watch them go through it. You can pray for them, bless, them, love them, but do not judge them, for they are doing the best they can with what they have, as so have you.

Pain Is A Gift

Life is fraught with pain. We will all experience pain in this life, but you get to choose whether the pain you experience will be long term suffering or healing pain.

You may be taken aback by the idea of choosing how you experience pain, if you are unfamiliar with the discipline of choice. You’re in good company because most people cannot wrap their head around the idea of choosing their pain.

Most people resign themselves to play the part of the victim and allow the forces around them to dictate when to be happy or sad, when to feel love or hate, when to feel good or bad.

If pain is inevitable (I don’t know if there’s any way to avoid pain) could you consider, if only for a moment, that you could make a conscious choice to have a perspective of fear which plays out as long term suffering, or from a perspective of love which uses the pain to heal, promote personal growth and the nurtures the advancement of your human potential.

When you assume the role of the victim, you allow something or someone else to have control over you and your emotions, and you can continue to give them this power over you over a prolonged term, even a lifetime, making you a slave to the pain.

Or, you can change your perspective by taking full responsibility for the pain (thus disarming the person or thing that was causing the pain) and look for the blessing.

While it may be hard to consider the idea that your pain can have blessing attached to it, this is an immutable reality.

All Pain Is a Gift

Better said, everything painful that you experience has within it a gift, a blessing. Something good and wonderful is waiting for you to discover it hidden within and masked by the pain. But you must diligently look for it to find it.

Pain is God’s way of saying, “Trust Me.”

If you surrender to the pain and focus on the circumstances outside, the landscape will be so cluttered that it would be impossible to see the forest for the trees.

But if you can take responsibility, possession, and ownership of the pain, you can gain the perspective necessary to find the hidden gift. And in many cases, once you are able to do this, you will find the pain may have kept you safe from something far worse,  possibly even saved your life.

You could spend a lifetime, punishing yourself, or someone or something else for some injustice. You see it all around you, people who are ever masking their pain, parading as a victim or self-medicating to mitigate the damages of being wronged. This is not only acceptable in the society which we live, but promoted as our slavery to pain enslaves us into addictions for profit.

The worse we feel about being victimized, the more we focus on abusing ourselves with alcohol, drugs, work, sex, hatred, anything that will give us a momentary sense of relief. Yet, try as we may, when the smoke clears, the lights go on, or the next day dawns, the pain remains. Unless you take action.

At the very least, do a search on YouTube for “Emotional Freedom Technique” (EFT). This is an effective method of breaking the neurological connection between the thought of the source of your pain and the physiological manifestation of the pain in your body.

You could visit an EFT practitioner to do the deep work, but you can easily find relief just by spending a few moments perusing YouTube, or if you have time, investigate via Google search.

This one simple technique is quick, easy and painless, freeing you from the evil grip the pain has on you. This can give you enough space to catch your breath, regain your equilibrium and exert your cognitive skills enough to start looking for the gift that is waiting to be uncovered.

Vow to never be enslaved by pain again. You are beginning to evolve into the more advanced form of yourself. Taking this action causes your life – even your DNA – to change.

You are awakening the new you trying to emerge, and all you have to do is to be open and proactive, allowing the transformation to take place naturally.