The Gift Of Pain - What Is Your Pain Trying To Tell You?
Your pain has a gift for you!
This is the subject of Helen MacMillan's recent book The Gift of Pain: An Invitation to Shift Your Perspective, Reclaim Your Power, and Transform Your Life.
Helen is a Life Coach, the founder and CEO of SovereignMinds LLC and now an author.
In our recent Bloom Wellness Talk, she treated us to a fascinating discussion of her book explaining what the gift of pain means for us.
Below are some highlights from our conversation.
The primary gift of pain is to awaken, to bring our awareness to something.
Pain is a messenger, with different messages for different people. It’s there to serve you.
Helen invites us to shift our perspective on pain.
If we think of pain as "bad", we naturally resist what we think of as bad and so we resist pain. We fight it.
And when we fight pain, we tense up and tighten which makes the pain worse.
Helen suggests that instead of resisting pain, we be curious about it, asking ourselves what message does our pain have for us?
She invites us to listen and not be judgemental about our pain, not labelling it as good or bad.
If we judge our pain as bad we are likely to tense up which again causes our pain to get worse.
However, getting to a place where we no longer judge our pain as bad is not always easy and is part of our work.
When we work on 1) recognising when we are judging our pain and 2) releasing our judgement, then we are likely to be able to identify the gifts/messages our pain has for us.
Judgement often blocks and separates us from these messages.
And so we are invited to be curious about our pain - all kinds of pain (physical, emotional, psychological) and not judge it.
P - Pause
A - And
I - Investigate
N - Now
The above is just the tip of the iceberg that is Helen's book!
I highly recommend you read Helen's book.
It includes a wealth of wisdom as well as practical exercises to help us to SHIFT.
SHIFT is one of Helen's tools but you'll have to get Helen's book to find out more. 😊
Get Helen's book here:
GET HELEN'S BOOK
IN CASE YOU DON’T KNOW ME…
I’m Karin, a certified yoga teacher based in Kingston, Jamaica.
I help women over 40 go from feeling achy to feeling great!
I have a free newsletter that is short, actionable, inspiring, and loved by over 700 subscribers!
Every week, I'll send you yoga/wellness tips plus one yoga pose that takes less than 2 minutes to do so you can experience the amazing benefits of yoga.
