Turn Any Pain You Have Into Your Purpose.
At 29 years old. I walked into an office - an oncologist in Boston. I was there to find out, why was I so sick? They had done a biopsy. They knew it was cancerous. I was there to find out my diagnosis and prognosis and what am I gonna do about this?
The doctor gave me a question. That doctor asked me, “Dan, how did such a young man get into the business of cancer?
And that question I turned inward and I asked myself.
In that answer I found that I was not living my true authentic self and I was definitely doing things that were not in the best interest of my optimal health, let’s just say that. And to summarize it pretty aggressively, I was living an ignorant and arrogant life.
After that Eternal moment, he had another thing to say. He said, “Dan with a little bit of suffering you will grow stronger.”
That was amazing. That says “Turn any pain you have into your purpose.”
Entering the pain is a lot less painful than resisting, is really what it came down to in the end. And I said I'm willing to enter that pain.
Embracing Intelligence and Awareness
The more intelligent you are the more suffering you're probably gonna have because the more awareness you have the more you won't care about society the more care about your own health and well-being.
So if you have a high level of intelligence, you're probably actually curious, you're actually reading, you're trying to improve the quality of your life, your children's life or anybody else's life.
Enter the Pain to Release It
Entering the pain is a lot less painful than resisting it.
And a lot of people a lot of people in our culture and society and even our educational systems we are not taught how to let go of pain. People carry their pain for decades. They lose a loved one. Sure go through the grieving process but 20 years of grieving that's something different. You know, that means you're holding on to the pain and you're not actually entering into it.
And what else I want to share with you about that.
When somebody asked me “what's my purpose?”
I ask, “What's your greatest challenge? What's your greatest struggle? What's the greatest thing that you want to overcome? That's your purpose.”
Your initial purpose is to overcome that and to show to yourself that you can do something you never thought you could do as possible.
To me, that's the greatest human experience, doing something I didn't think I could do. When someone says you have terminal cancer and then I finally say you know what? I don't believe you. I don't believe that I'll do my part, you do your part and I have to enter the pain and suffering go beyond my thinking and beliefs or current beliefs about what is possible.
Go beyond my mind.
And guess what? It's true.
Anything is possible if you actually go beyond the mind and when you enter the pain you're going beyond the mind of holding on to the pain.
And that's a very just big distinction. When you let go of the pain, you go beyond
Being Witnessed in Pain
The challenge we all face about entering the pain. Is being witnessed in that pain because when we were little and we were struggling with our pain oftentimes mothers and fathers the people we grew up with we don't know if they were actually emotionally available for us to be in our pain and to witness us in our pain with any sort of loving attention.
Rather they felt uncomfortable themselves, and they wanted to take your pain away with something external.
And so now you grow up thinking the only way to get out of this pain is to get something external to take my pain away.
That's not entering the pain, that's sort of self-medicating and managing it and coping with it.
But then it just becomes layer upon layer upon layer as you get older.
So entering the pain means, stop doing the things that are external to taking away our pain.
One example was when I had a tumor in my spine. That pain was excruciating. To feel a tumor growing through my bone and cracking the bone and growing into my psoas muscle. That was so excruciating. They gave me a lot of opiate pain medication. And I didn't take them. I didn't take them because it reminded me of what the doctor said, “entering the pain is a lot less painful than resisting it” and all I had to do is say bring it on. If I don't die, I'm fine. If it doesn't kill me, I'm going to keep going.
So it was all these little mantras that you can come up with. “Bring it on.” “I can handle it.” You know, “You can't kill me.”
That was kind of the way I was approaching that particular phase. And there were many other phases that I recognized that taking a drug to ease that pain was not going to help me find out the message beyond the pain.
Key Takeaways
Pain is an opportunity to grow stronger and discover your true purpose. Embrace it rather than resisting it.
Individuals with a higher level of intelligence may experience more suffering due to increased awareness and concern for self, loved ones, and society.
Turn your pain into your purpose. This will help you move past limitations and you can do the seemingly impossible.
Refrain from relying on external solutions to alleviate or cope with pain and instead confront it directly for deeper understanding and healing.
