Pain is an inevitable feeling as a part of the human experience in this world. Human life is full of potentially harmful experiences, both physical and emotional, thus, pain is not solely felt through the somatic senses, but can also occur on the emotional level. It gives a person a signal that something is going wrong, and the body and mind are requesting the withdrawal from the source of the negative impact on the organism and solution of the problem. However, pain does not always require the immediate withdrawal, especially when felt during the personal growth, spiritual practices or the episodes of empathy and compassion. In these cases, this unpleasant feeling is a part of the growth or recovery process that serves as an indicator of the progress and level of development of the person’s emotional competence. While pain is generally producing suffering, the latter is not always a necessary accompaniment for this feeling and can often become rather a choice, than an imminent consequence. The recognition of pain makes a person work toward eliminating its causes, sometimes making him or her start living a better, healthier and more conscious life, and sometimes trying to make a world a better place. Thus, pain can potentially become a good source for learning and improving one’s life and the world around.
The first sphere of my life, where I feel pain is my physical body. It is a fragile mechanism that needs good and careful maintenance, and in case of failure or malfunctioning one of its parts can become ill. I have been feeling a back pain for a long time now, and its main cause is the lack of proper exercising and healthy life style, as I spend much time indoors working on my computer. Many people experience this problem; however, not many try to find a solution before the occurrence of the bigger health issues caused by bad habits, such as slouching. This is pain experience in a personal life and relates to the physical side of the human nature. Such physical pain can lead to inevitable suffering that can hardly be eliminated by spiritual exercises and needs physical intervention, such as exercising, massage and other medical measures. This kind of pain is a negative one that hints on the necessity to change the lifestyle.
The second kind of pain I feel in this world is emotional pain caused by the unpleasant and hurting experience in relationships with other people. I have experience a loss of my relative a couple of years ago, and my heart was aching on an emotional, rather than physical level. Although this pain was hard to bear, it was neither a negative, nor a positive experience, but rather an inevitable consequence of even being very close to anyone. This pain was inflicted not only by the loss of someone I loved, but also by establishing a strong personal connection of love with this person in the first place. After having realized the source of this pain, I decided that my suffering does not benefit people, who are still alive. According to Clifford N. Lazarus, the way to heal pain from loss is by facing it, sharing about it with friends and beloved ones and reminding oneself that there are still many people that need one’s attention (Lazarus, 2013). I started behaving more consciously toward other close people in my life, as I also realized that we are all going to lose one another one day, and it is important to value every minute spent with them, rather than taking them for granted, as it usually happens. This emotional pain helped me become a better and more loving person.
The third type of pain is a pain cause by empathy toward other people. The world is full of socio-economic problems, and unfortunately, people do not realize how these issues can influence the life of the person experiencing them. However, participating in charity events, I learned a lot about poverty and struggles of people living in it. Although I did not experience poverty myself, using empathy and compassion, I could feel the pain of people, who were suffering from it. This pain brought suffering in my life too, but instead of immersing into depressive thoughts and avoiding the subject matter, I decided that I could do better than that. This pain helped me shape my compassions skills, which, according to the journal Cerebral Cortex, are “feeling concern for another’s suffering and desiring to enhance that individual’s welfare” (as cited in Hoffman, 2013). This empathic, social pain was not caused by my personal experience, but by the experience of the poor people, and the only way to alleviate it was to help spread the word about the cause and help the people suffering from poverty.
Pain will always be present in life and admitting it and consciously working on understanding its causes can help diminish it. The aforesaid three kinds of pain have a common element of suffering, although they are experienced on different levels and in different spheres of life. All three kinds of pain can be coped with by becoming conscious about their causes and working on understanding and sometime eliminating them. In each case, understanding the causes of pain helped me become a better person living a life with higher awareness, which became a benefit not only for me, but for people, whom I have met and am going to meet in my life journey.
References
Hoffman, A. (2013, August 22). When empathy hurts, compassion can heal. Greater Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life. Retrieved October 5, 2014, from http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/when_empathy_hurts_compassion_can_heal
Lazarus, C. N. (2013, August 28). Five tips for coping with loss. Psychology Today. Retrieved October 5, 2014, from http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/think-well/201308/five-tips-coping-loss
