Woman plunges in ice bath on Hove beachfront

Read time: 3 min 34 sec

Summary: I discuss how pain (both physical and emotional) can be used for growth and why it’s ALWAYS trying to speak to you.

One arbitrary Tuesday in 2020, I had an epiphany.

I’d just stubbed my toe on a chair leg and was cursing the inanimate object for being there.

I’d clipped the wooden leg with such force that it brought tears to my eyes and I had to stop what I was doing.

In fact, I feared I’d broken my little piggy and wanted to cry "Wee! Wee! Wee!" all the way home.

You see, I was rushing and not paying attention.

And then it suddenly dawned on me…

I wasn’t being present and honouring the moment in front of me. I was trying to get to a future moment as if it were more important than this one.

Huh…

I started to smile. Was this the Universe’s way of telling me to pay attention?

It got me thinking about how I used to stub my toes or whack my elbow on stuff all the time and how, ever since I’d started practicing being more present, I didn’t do it anywhere near as often.

In fact, everything in my life had improved and I was experiencing far less pain in general. Both physically and emotionally.

So rather than seeing pain as an unfortunate thing to be cursed, I began to notice how pain was always trying to grab my attention and bring me back into the now.

That’s when I came up with the acronym PAIN = Pay Attention Inwardly Now.

So how does this relate to emotional pain too? Let me explain…

Suppressed emotions have now been linked to physical disease

Black woman staring intensely at the camera

A recent study showed that suppressed anger in women of colour correlated with a 70 per cent increased risk of atherosclerosis, raising their risk of heart disease.

Is it just a coincidence or is the body trying to tell us something? Is the avoidance of the original emotional pain resurfacing in another form? Or does the suppressed anger lead to other behaviours which increase the risk of atherosclerosis?

This was certainly the case for me in 2017 when I experienced a lot of emotional pain in a short space of time. But I wasn’t aware enough yet or had the tools to know how to process it. So my mind leant on every possible vice to distract me from it.

Work, gym, travel, relationships, fast food, alcohol. And guess what? I ended up with a plethora of physical and mental health issues. And I believe they were all linked to my suppressed emotional pain.

It would take another 2 years for me to fully pay attention to my pain and feel what needed to be felt.

But once I did, everything started falling into place and my physical and mental health transformed. Almost as if the Universe was rewarding me for doing so and had been using pain as a tool to help me wake up and live in the now. Thanks Universe (I guess…).

Now… what about physical pain you say? Surely that’s just unfortunate and can’t be linked to any higher purpose?

Well, I believe it’s exactly the same. It just manifests differently. Which means you may have to work a little harder with your awareness to find the root cause.

How to Uncover the Root of Your Physical Pain

Now, if any of you have ever been to one of my Cold Water Therapy Workshops, you may remember a slide from the Mindset section, where I present a simple statement:

short-term comfort (pleasure) = long-term discomfort (suffering)
short-term discomfort (discipline) = long-term comfort (wellbeing).

What’s fascinating about this idea is how you can work backwards to discover the root cause of your suffering.

For example, I recently injured my hip when weight training. I developed something called greater trochanteric pain syndrome (also known as hip bursitis).

This is where your hip joint gets inflamed from too much stress. There are many causes, but in my case, I believe it was due to my sudden increase in squat load/intensity. I was trying to strengthen my legs in order to squat clean and jerk 100kg. And was training my legs too hard.

Why 100kg?

No reason really other than it sounded cool. So it was an ego-based goal. A goal that would temporarily make me feel better but not actually provide much lasting fulfilment. It would temporarily strengthen my sense of self, which is simply another vice and another way to avoid living in the now.

Once I made this connection, I thought “Ah… I can see why my hip hurts now.” It wasn’t just that I was training too hard, it was that the motivation BEHIND the training was ego-based and I believe the pain was trying to alert me to the fact that I wasn’t doing it for the right reasons.

So, after a year of resisting and trying to train around it, I finally let go of that goal and focused on recovery and the pain/inflammation quickly subsided.

It’s often said that pain is out greatest teacher. I believe both physical and emotional pain are designed to pull on our awareness and force us to pay attention. It’s simply a messenger alerting us to something that needs attention.

As the saying goes, “what you resist, persists”. So the question is, are you willing to let go of what you’re striving for and really listen?

Sometimes this is easier to spot in others than in ones self and not everyone is ready to accept it.

PAIN = Pay Attention Inwardly Now

Man takes ice bath on Brighton & Hove Beachfront

So there you go. Next time, you experience pain of any kind, remember the acronym Pay Attention Inwardly Now and see if you can discover the root cause.

And then, see if you can let go of whatever you are resisting. What happens to the pain after? I’d love to know.

Let me know in the comments if you agree/disgree and have any good examples of your own.