How I Use Pain to Grow

Conscious suffering and the path of self-liberation.

This post is about making meaning out of pain and learning from it. This might be too painful to even contemplate if you’re still in the shock of grief or early recovery stages of burnout. This is more for when your nervous system has achieved some stability and comfort and you are doing integration work.

---

My memory of my youth is hazy, but I believe the first book I read in the spiritual growth genre was Meetings with Remarkable Men by the mystic and philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff. I found it on my dad’s bookshelf. It was written in 1927. (My dad only liked old things—old music, old stamps, old books. 😂)

I’m sure I didn’t finish it, but I read enough that my mind was slightly blown. I think it was around 8th grade, and it felt like I was being given some secret information about how the Universe really works. 

Gurdjieff taught that people are not conscious of themselves and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep", but that it is possible to awaken to a higher state of consciousness and serve our purpose as human beings. (Wikipedia)

Later, in college, I looked up who was that weird guy who wrote that weird book, and found this quote of his from a different book:

“A man will renounce any pleasure you like but he will not give up his suffering. Man is made in such a way that he is never so attached to anything as he is to his suffering. “

This idea had a profound effect on me, because I immediately recognized it as true, and terrible, and ridiculous. 

I made a commitment to myself to stop doing that, whenever I noticed it. (And then spent the rest of my life being fairly bad at that, but at least not giving up. 😆)

There are different kinds of suffering.

Gurdjieff differentiated between “stupid suffering” and “conscious suffering”. This is somewhat similar to the ideas of “clean pain” and “dirty pain” in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. 

Clean pain is the unavoidable pain of living a human existence. It is the pain of loss, heartbreak, grief, and illness. 

Dirty pain is all the things we do to avoid feeling the clean pain. It’s avoidance, distraction, obsession, projection—all the defense mechanisms, addictions—every way we turn away from the pain and try not to feel it. Clean pain is going through it—dirty pain is trying to go around it, and creating more pain in the process.

Stupid suffering is self-inflicted pain. It’s the neurotic guilt you feel even when you’ve done nothing wrong—it’s telling yourself you “should” be different, that life “shouldn’t” be like it is. It’s resistance to reality. It’s all the painful stories we tell ourselves—that we’re not good enough, that we’re broken. This kind of suffering is pointless, and entirely avoidable, but it is to this kind of suffering that we become deeply attached and ego-identified. A lot of growth work comes down to prying ourselves away from our endless fascination with feeling terrible for no real purpose. Mindfulness, self-observation, and cognitive therapies like CBT help with this kind of suffering. 

Conscious suffering is accepting pain as the price of wisdom. It is the decision to bravely face the pain of Earthly existence, and use it for self-transformation. This is the “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” school of fierce emotional courage. In practice, conscious suffering means turning toward your pain, despite how much you would like to avoid it, and doing that over and over and over and over. It means developing stamina and resilience to face your shit, learn the lesson, and get to the freedom on the other side. 

So, conscious suffering is the courageous choice to feel the clean pain, when all you want to do is avoid it and generate some good ol’ dirty pain instead.

A caveat for my “hardcore” people.

I am all about that growth life, but I will say that in my twenties, I had no chill about it. And growth is a marathon, not a sprint. So if you tend to overdo things, this section is for you!

The thing about your ego is that it’s always listening. And I don’t know about you, but when my ego hears teachings like these, it starts to go into hardcore mode and use this as a new way to produce more stupid suffering by pushing myself too hard. 

Sometimes, using distractions to put off feeling pain is actually self-care, because your nervous system simply cannot handle feeling everything at once. In this case, avoidance serves as titration. It lets you process your pain a little at a time. Short-term avoidance to slow down the process to a manageable level is not “dirty pain”. In my mind, it only becomes “dirty pain” when it’s causing more problems than it’s solving. 

Only you know if you are pushing yourself the right amount—not too little so you stagnate, and not too much because your ego has something to prove. Only you know how burned out or exhausted you are, or how deep your pain goes. You have to make the decision that is right for you. These concepts are for self-awareness, not setting up a new standard to compare yourself to.  

How I learned to love triggers.

If you are constantly triggered, then you need to stabilize yourself first. Stability and safety is always the first step in healing.

But if you are relatively stable, then getting triggered is a huge gift because it gives you direct access to whatever past wound is still unhealed. This lets you directly apply self-love and self-care to your hurt parts. If you tend to suppress your pain most of the time, turning directly toward it when it comes up is the fastest way to heal.

I talk more about how to work with triggers consciously over here on my blog.

(I want to be super duper clear that if you are in an unhealthy situation that keeps triggering you, I am not saying you should stay to “learn from it”. Dysfunctional dynamics don’t just trigger old wounds, they also create new ones and entrench negative patterns, and they make it impossible to heal. Again, healing requires a supportive, safe, and stable environment. Don’t tell yourself you are learning if you’re just getting hurt over and over. That’s delusion. And I say that with love—I spent many years in these kinds of situations, and it took a long time for me to break this pattern.)

But let’s be honest, you will probably avoid the pain until you can’t anymore.

I’m not writing this article from a position of having always made the courageous choice. I have spent the last three years doing intense healing work that I spent the previous 20 years avoiding. Even though I’ve always been a personal growth junkie, there were certain levels of pain that I studiously avoided dealing with, and clung to my healing fantasy instead.

I was very stubborn. The same stubbornness that is an asset to my growth journey was also there in my avoidance strategies. 

I didn’t choose courage until I had gone down the wrong road so far that I’d run into a brick wall, and finally realized there was no other option but to actually face my deepest pain. That is what “rock bottom” means. It’s what the burnout journey is about. Your ego finally gives up in exhaustion and releases its grip, so you can do the things that actually work—the things your ego was preventing you from doing before. 

(Tangentially—that is why conscious suffering is also spiritual work. Because the ego is also what blocks spiritual connection. The ego wants to be the God of your world. It wants to be in charge. But it actually just makes stupid self-destructive decisions a lot of the time. It’s useful only when it’s curtailed and put in its place. One way to do that is to strengthen your wiser, larger Self that is in touch with the Divine. Another way is to exhaust the ego by burning yourself out following its commands. If you’re stubborn like I am, you’ll probably end up with the latter by default. But the silver lining is that you will be far more open to the Divine in this state—or, if you are not into that, more open to your heart, to your authentic self, and to new ideas and new directions.)

I think of it like this: when everything that you thought mattered is stripped from you, then you can clearly see what can never be taken from you. You realize who you really are. You find your authentic self. You find your truth. Because it’s all that’s left. 

As shitty as it feels to get to that place, the strength and power that comes from recovery is priceless.

Three years ago, everything I waited and hoped and suffered for turned out to be a completely delusional fantasy that dissolved to reveal a grim and desolate reality. And I had put everything I was into that dream. But it was flawed from the start, a tower just waiting to fall. I had to face the me that, 10 years ago, chose to build their fairytale castle on sand.

I had to accept my own bad choices, and look at all the distorted logic and dysfunctional patterns I was playing out, and where they came from. I spent several years swimming through the debris of my shattered psyche trying to find solid ground (and getting divorced).

But what has followed is glorious. I feel a clarity and strength that I never dreamed possible. I know who I am. I know what I’m capable of. I know what I need. I know what matters to me. And I know how to say no, and what to say no to. 

I no longer need a rescue fantasy, because I know that I can rescue myself.

We can’t choose who we fall in love with, or what wells we fall down. But we can choose how we climb out of them. We can choose to not just “make the best of it”, but to make the best of ourselves. We can choose to use our painful experiences as a sword to cut away the diseased tissue of our life, so that we can be healthy and free. We can choose to own the experience and use it.

And we can choose what story we tell ourselves about it. 

Find a narrative that gives your pain meaning.

You get to choose the meaning you assign to your pain, and some stories are more inspiring than others.

For me, my spiritual framework is that life’s pain is a series of lessons that refine my soul over many lifetimes. This refinement is a process of learning how to choose love when my body is screaming at me to choose fear. On a spiritual level, the lesson is always the same: remember. Remember you are more than this pain. Remember you are bigger than this experience. Remember that who you really are transcends everything you experience here on Earth.

I believe we choose to forget who we really are when we incarnate because there is no way an infinite and immortal being could ever experience despair. But by going through hell, and finding our way out of it, we become stronger, and some amount of that strength we get to take with us.

This story is the most powerful narrative I’ve come across for helping me get the most out of my pain. For whatever reason, doing the best I can by my soul, and working through all the karma I possibly can to pave the way for better incarnations for some future version of me, really inspires me to a sort of spiritual fierceness.

But if this kind of narrative doesn’t work for you, that’s totally OK—I just encourage you to find a narrative that is meaningful to you, that puts your pain in a context that is empowering to you. You can journal with these questions: Who have I become through this experience? What did this pain teach me? What do I think pain is for?

It’s not possible to have a pain-free life on Earth. But I believe it is always possible to use the pain to develop our virtues—strength and compassion, self-honesty, humility, patience, resilience, power, self-mastery.

Conscious suffering is the basis of self-liberation.

Do I want that to be the case? Hell, no! I resisted it for a long-ass time. I felt there had to be some easier way. How could suffering ever be necessary? It felt absurd. Who came up with this system!? I want to talk to the manager!

But now that I’m on the other side of it, I understand that sometimes the only way to undo an attachment to suffering is for the pain to get bad enough that you willingly give it up. Then you find the actually easier way—healing. Loving yourself. Forgiving yourself. Giving yourself what you need. Giving up self-sacrifice. Taking responsibility for your own needs and your own self-care. Learning to stop hurting yourself or allowing others to hurt you. Saying no and walking away from what doesn’t work, what will never work. Accepting that your needs are just your needs—they aren’t optional, and you can’t use them as currency and expect that to work out well for you.

To give up on a bad strategy that you have an intense attachment to, it has to become so bad that you can’t live in denial of the cost anymore. And the process of peeling that denial away is so damn painful. But it’s clean pain, finally. It’s the kind of pain that heals. And the resilience you develop as you process that pain is what liberates you. Oh, I survived the thing that I was killing myself to avoid feeling. I guess I can handle this life thing after all.