Let’s talk about pain. How do you get rid of it? How do you make it go away?
I’m not talking about spiritual pain, or medical pain, but life pain. There is a huge number of resources for the first two, but few even acknowledge the third kind.
Since I coach and instruct living in focused energy and empowering your life through mindful balance, I do feel I have solid ground to stand on for discussing ridding pain from your life.
Pain can appear in any number of places in your life: in relationships, in your finances, at work, your muscles, and even in your digestive system, for example. The quick answer, in my way of thinking, is that your life is out of balance when you have pains.
Pain is a great barometer to help you know that things are out of whack in your life. You could be spending too much time in an area, or three, of your life. Or, you could be spending too little time in an area. Pain is like a biofeedback mechanism to let you know you need to make changes. That’s so cool!
Do you listen to those little aches and pains in your life? Do you correctly translate what the pain correlates to? Do you take action to make the changes to alleviate the pains? That’s the trick, isn’t it — listening and translating…and taking action.
Listening and translating those messages are tricky enough I’ll address them in next week’s post. Let’s stick with taking action for this post.
Working too much can pull on relationships, tugging them out of alignment. It also tends to short-change your play, your exercise routine, and maybe healthy eating too. Enjoying your work is important, and even seeing it as play is healthy. Even then, refueling your energy levels and creativity is important to keeping your work vital and productive.
It’s when overworking interferes with relationships you’ve got to get serious about making changes. Not to the relationships, but to the work load. Relationships are critical to your health and well being. Research shows that people with close friends are healthier, happier, and live longer. If you love your work, it stands to reason that you’d want to live longer so you can do more of it. And who doesn’t want to be healthier and happier?
Maybe you work too little. That has a wide-ranging impact on your life too. Your pains are very different from when you work too much. But, it causes pain just the same. You come up with some examples of living in one area too much or too little and see where the pain is.
So, how do you get rid of the pain? Maybe your fix is a quick and easy one. But for most people, it’s a lifetime of bad habits that has lead to an unbalanced life. In that case, the fix may not feel so quick or easy. My coaching advice always is to take small steps.
Being committed to making a change in your life is the first step. I know that sounds trite, but it’s true. You see it time and again in either your life or the lives of the people around you. How many people who make New Year’s resolutions stick with them for long? Not many, statistics say. Why? Because people are rarely committed to those resolutions. And there can be too many resolutions, and resolutions that are too big a change.
The same is true of weight loss or exercise programs — good intentions, but not a strong commitment. Let’s branch out a little bit: independent learning programs or keeping a tidy home or office space can suffer the same fate as changes. Not enough wins there. Lots of pain there.
New habits are hard to maintain. Commitment is one element of that; it has to be felt to the core to help you get through the challenges forming new habits cause. Too big a goal — too large a step — is often a culprit too. Your friends, family, associates, and even yourself, will sabotage your efforts. I know. I’ve been there. The number of times I gave up sugar, before the commitment was strong enough to make the change stick, is laughable!
What change have you committed to that didn’t stick? Why? What change have you committed to that did stick? Why? Combine that knowledge — of what did and didn’t work for you — and apply that to getting your life back in balance.
One suggestion for getting rid of the pain in your life is to meditate. Daily. With five to ten minutes of daily meditation your mind calms, stress eases, and thinking clears. Daily meditation might remove several pains in your life.
One other tip to help you with making changes — and thus removing pain: connect with others making the same change, or at least making some change in their lives. You can share your wisdom and your support, you can hold each other accountable, and you can celebrate the successes together.
Commitment. Small steps. Community. That’s the way to make pain go away in your LIFE.