We hurt where we care and we care where we hurt - learning to listen to my pain

Learning how to “harness” my pain taught me a ton about myself and I developed my own process for it. Looking back I am extremely grateful and think that this skill is the most powerful skill I have learned over the years and I am sure I would be in a much worse place if I hadn’t learned this.

Over the years I’ve come to call it “Walking into the Storm”. I just wanted to give it a cool name but at the same time it fits really well as it is different from either repressing or white-knuckling through the pain and also different from letting myself get pulled into the pain and whine, worry and ruminate endlessly.


“Walking into the Storm” is the fine line between those two ways of REACTING to pain. And it’s about learning to RELATE differently to pain. So you can actually harness it.

And btw, I use “pain” here as a placeholder for all kinds of discomfort (physical pain, emotional pain, mental pain).


I found that, after the fact it feels extremely rewarding and that it “sticks with you”. A man who can perceive pain simply as what it is and not what he makes out of it, this man can be self-directed and learn to walk with purpose. In my case, that alone gave me more quality of life than anything else I can personally think of.

I didn’t simply learn a better way to endure pain but to “move through it” or “with it”. Accept it as a natural part of the human condition that we all share.


From my own experience and in endless talks with other guys I came to the conclusion that a man who can accept his human, natural pain knows that it is merely a signal and a message and doesn’t waste his valuable time and energy in running from it or fighting it.

He can focus on the immensely valuable message instead. Unlike when we engage in suffering which is a distractor. Because we hurt where we care and we care where we hurt.


Whenever I still lose myself in whining, endless rumination, worrying, “stuffing it down” as a main go-to method, and constantly ask “Why me? Why ME?!” I get absolutely distracted from what I actually care about by trying to squirm myself out of experiencing my pain fully. Distracted from the message of the pain by being preoccupied with fighting it or running away from it instead of walking right into it and learning its lesson.


And during all this time of stuffing it down or running away from it I never got good at actually handling my pain in a way that brought me any deep and lasting satisfaction with life. But instead I only became better at fighting it or running away from it.

And the more pain accumulated over time the better I HAD to get at escaping it somehow.

Eventually losing myself in an endless cycle of more and more intense distractions. That part may sound familiar to you and you know what I am referring to.


Frantically searching for ever more intense lullabies instead of waking up to the authentic direction my pain was trying to guide me. How I actually wanted to build my life.

And once I started doing that, my zest for life came back almost instantly and no matter how hard the day or the work is, it still feels more rewarding and satisfying than anything I used to know.


Cutting myself off of my pain the way I used to with repression or running, I aso cut myself off of my sense of purpose. What I truly cared about. And that is too great a cost.


Truth be told, I fall short of living authentically to my truth still sometimes. Even though it’s not pmo anymore. But there are still a million and one ways to distract myself and squirm my way out of simply experiencing my pain. But I have never been in a better place and regularly connecting with my values through my meditations is worth every minute of it.