Have you ever professed my preferred mantra, “I’m Great! All the time!” and received the rejoiner, “How can you be great, even when you are in great pain?” Yeah, me, too. People tauntingly query me all the time, “How can you be as great as you claim when there is so much pain and suffering in the world.” To each and all of them, I explain, “It’s all a matter of your definition of “Greatness!” and specifically, when faced with pain, it’s all about how you define the pain you face and how you respond to it.
Many dispute the origin of the quote, “Pain is inevitable, suffering it optional.” Some attribute it to Buddha, others to the Dali Lama; at least one source says Haruki Murakami, a self-styled modern Japanese writer said it first. Regardless, of who said it or says it when, I believe the statement is wrong, because I believe the premise that “pain is inevitable” is wrong and I reject it — all the time.
Almost forty years ago, in my first year of my aborted medical education (I left after my second year – a decision that still at times causes me pain), my Dorland’s Pocket Medical Dictionary taught me, “Pain is a feeling of distress, suffering, or agony, caused by stimulation of specialized nerve endings.” Medicine, up that generation at least, limited pain to physical sensation. Modern medicine, however, now includes in the definition the body-mind-spirit triad of pain. Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary medically defines pain as:
a: a state of physical, emotional, or mental lack of well-being or physical, emotional, or mental uneasiness that ranges from mild discomfort or dull distress to acute often unbearable agony, may be generalized or localized, and is the consequence of being injured or hurt physically or mentally or of some derangement of or lack of equilibrium in the physical or mental functions (as through disease), and that usually produces a reaction of wanting to avoid, escape, or destroy the causative factor and its effects
b: a basic bodily sensation that is induced by a noxious stimulus, is received by naked nerve endings, is characterized by physical discomfort (as pricking, throbbing, or aching), and typically leads to evasive action.
Webster’s both rightly and wrongly describes pain as “a state of … lack of well-being or … uneasiness that … is the consequence of … [a] lack of equilibrium in the physical or mental functions … that usually produces a reaction of wanting to avoid, escape, or destroy the causative factor and its effects ….” It is right in its first two-third, that pain is but a feeling, a lack of well-being or an uneasiness caused by inequalibrium; but it is wrong in embracing the idea that pain should produce a “fight or flight” response to cause of one’s pain.
You need neither fight nor flee the cause of your pain. Rather, you can, if you so desire, use the P10 Principle to embrace and affirmatively relate with and respond to the cause of your pain.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Dr. Viktor Frankl wrote about the psychological impacts of life as a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps of World War II. Like many of my paternal ancestors’ relatives, Frankl’s mother, father, brother, and pregnant wife were all killed in the camps. His captors took virtually everything of personal value and basic human dignity from him. The sole thing the Nazis could not strip from him, however, was his choice as to how to respond to the deprivation, degradation, and trauma to which he was subjected. Frankl meaningfully chose to focus his energies on “owning” that small but vital space between the noxious stimulus received by his naked nerve endings and his response to it. Frankl’s ability to retain his energetic, emotional, and intellectual autonomy in the most horrific circumstances imaginable provides a near-perfect example of the value of having intrapersonal strength and grace under extreme duress to use one’s power of personal choice to use one’s precious resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people to embrace one’s pain and decide to make something inherently positive out of something inherently negative instead of fleeing or fighting that which in the present circumstances can neither be fought nor fled.
For, as Frankl is often quoted, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
[reminder]Do you have the Greatness! to embrace and relate with your pain?[/reminder]
