Why Is Pain the Best Teacher?

As we go through our life journey, we accumulate countless experiences. Many of these experiences will create wonderful memories, which we will cherish for the rest of our lives, however, some of our experiences will torment us for years to come. This is because we are never immune to pain.

If you are a human being living on Earth currently or at any time in human history, you have experienced pain, probably more than you desire. For our remote ancestors, the pain was that of survival, not knowing where their next meal was coming from, and protecting themselves from predators and enemy tribes.

In this day and age, our pains have evolved as our world has progressed in innovation and technology and we demand more from the world around us and those we are in relationship with. Pain comes from the stresses of modern society including staying out of debt and achieving financial stability and success, navigating romantic, family, and friend relationships in our daily busy lives, staying healthy and avoiding chronic disease in a toxic world, the constant bombardment by marketing and advertising that tells us we need to buy a product or experience to make us better than who we are, the worsening climate crisis and how it affects our part of the world, and the never-ending stream of negative news that is always vying for our attention.

By virtue of being human, pain is inevitable; the only question is how much and how often. What matters is what we will do about it. This is where the greatest opportunity lies. You see, most people avoid pain and the difficult emotions that go along with the experience that causes the pain. They do this by suppressing these emotions, which, over time, usually leads to more suffering.

Our job is not to avoid the experiences that cause pain but to live and savour every moment as if it is our last and to meet whatever experience we are presented with without judgment. We are not here to judge our experiences but to dance with them and use them to learn more about who we are. This is the beauty of the unknown because it presents us with what we need in this very moment, regardless of our expectations of how our lives should unfold.

This is why pain is the best teacher if we let it be. We are never sent more than we can bear and everything that comes our way is a blessing if we allow it to be. I do not deny that people often go through terrible traumas such as sexual and physical abuse or the tragic loss of loved ones in the various war zones which rage around the world. These things happen and we cannot change them once they have.

So why not learn from them?

How do we allow pain to be our greatest teacher?

We can do this by asking ourselves a series of questions when we experience something we perceive as negative that leads to pain.

1. Who am I in relation to this experience?
2. What have I learned from this experience that I did not previously know?
3. Are there any blessings in this experience?
4. How will I deal with a similar situation in the future?

I can give you an example of this from my own life. I am a martial artist and practice Filipino martial arts in the form of Kali. This involves empty-hand techniques as well as weapons such as sticks and blades. I routinely take part in full-contact stick sparring with limited protective gear, which is just a fencing helmet and hockey gloves. Last year in one sparring match, despite protective gloves, my opponent managed to fracture my left fifth metacarpal bone, which is a bone in the hand. This injury took me out of martial arts for six months.

It was not only physically painful but also emotionally painful, not being able to engage in combat for such a long period of time. Over time, however, I learned more from this experience than from any other martial arts experience. First, the way I engaged in sparring had been reckless and not strategic. I was routinely exposing myself to attack and injury by not maneuvering effectively. Second, I was reacting to my opponent’s attack instead of anticipating their next move and cutting them off before they unleashed it. I learned these valuable lessons and so much more from my injury, which forged me into a more effective fighter.

In the end, my metacarpal fracture was a blessing in disguise, helping me grow and evolve in Kali, which I did not realize at first but discovered over time.

So, you see, life will only give us what we need, including pain, to foster our higher evolution regardless of how we perceive our past and present. The only question is whether we will have the wisdom to harness all that life has to offer no matter how difficult it seems at face value.