Pain is something that we all experience, and is often seen as that negative side effect of an experience. We fall, and when the blood starts to ooze from our wound we immediately feel pain. You spent time in a relationship, and it ended poorly; what was there right at the very end? Pain. These experiences are shoved away and shunned because we don’t want to feel that pain. Pain is a detractor, it prohibits us from doing other actions and observing what is going on around us. Pain, it seems, can have no benefits.

There are two ways to deal with your pain; you can ignore it, or you can embrace it. There are many new methods of ignoring your pain; we have multibillion dollar industries thirsting for your pain and feeding off our pathetic attempts to deal with bad situations. Counselors are paid to listen, and tell you to get over it. There are greedy drug companies selling us narcotics to mask the pain from our body, and give our brains something else to think about. Some even have groups of people who get together and share what they feel, festering groups of shammed “victims” trying to escape their own pain by passing it on to another. Pain is inevitable, if you want to be treated fair, if you want to be out of pain the fastest method is to end it at the source, kill yourself. Each body is the same; a useless heap of decaying flesh means nothing to anybody, the person you cared for is not there, they are not the same. However this method of dealing with pain is for the sick and cowardly, when you face a problem, stand and face it like you should; anything less should result in a suspension of your right to survive.

Now notice another thing: something that always accompanies pain, a lesson. No matter how much pain you receive there is knowledge to be gained, and those who ignore a chance to gain, and instead wallow in self-pity need to chose a new life. In each moment of pain you are suppressing your chance to bask in the euphoria of knowing you have done something, a feeling a pride, not fear. When you feel pain you know you are alive, you know that you can still learn, still fight. ‘To what end would we fight’, you may ask, ‘For that little bit of extra knowledge.’ When you fell and scraped your knee, if you could only see past the pain, there is something there, something to be seen. The way your skin opened up, and the red ooze gently seeped to the surface of your skin, before finally manifesting in a bright drop of crimson life. When you lost that one you had cared for, did you notice you know can see something like this again? The next time that someone comes along, you can take measures to do more, you can prevent the situation from happening again. Whenever there is pain there is a learning experience, meet the pain head on, then refuse to be beaten, take your stance and breakthrough, you need not to worry of getting hurt when you know the only thing that hurts is pain itself.

Pain is also like a drug, to be taken in small amounts, rarely, decreases the sting each new welt will leave. If, when you got that previous burn, you had milked the festering wound for more pain, then perhaps there could be benefits. When you take too much a drug, you need more to stay high, the same principal applies with pain. Relative to the first experience with any pain, after each successive “enlightenment” you gain a passage, or numbness from the pain; do this enough and you soon will not need to even think about it. By applying large amounts of controlled pain, by yourself at brief time periods you can keep this shield up, allowing minimal things to pass without notice, and allowing larger things to cut with a more dull blade. This self induced pain can be thought of akin to ripping off a scab, no matter how many times you rip it off, it will heal eventually, and the pain also dies off. The first few times your blood is exposed to the air , you may give up hope; if you remember the benefits of inducing pain, you can always get through. Confronting the pain on your own terms lets you have the upper hand, when you only feel pain when you decide it, no pain is ever that difficult to bear.

By confronting this pain you will soon learn to realize that there never was any real pain. This may seem ironic but it’s true; after a point your brain will realize that pain is a useless response, and continue with other things, such as analyzing the moment. When you have eliminated, not ignored, this feeling, you are that much more free in your world, and will have a greater understanding. With that knowledge you know you have done better than many common people before you, and that your life is worth using for a purpose, not as a reactant to the stimuli around you.