“The purpose of pain is not to make you sad, remember that. This is where people always miss the point… This pain’s purpose is to make you more alert, because people become alert only when the arrow goes deep into the heart and wounds it. Otherwise, they pay no attention. When life is easy, comfortable, and pleasant, who cares?”
— Osho
How would you feel if you went to a psychotherapist, shared your problem, and instead of helping you get rid of it, they told you: “Great! Don’t do anything to improve the situation; just stay in it with total awareness—as if you were observing someone else’s life—and explore exactly how all of this is happening to you.” You probably wouldn’t understand what they were saying, right?
Since I say exactly this to my clients in certain situations, I decided to explain the hidden logic behind such guidance. It is simple: every problem enters our lives as a hidden gift. To unwrap it and see its contents, we must not rush to discard it, but rather look closer. Instead of running away, we move toward it, even if the path to the surface requires hitting rock bottom first.
Every psychological suffering is an opportunity for awareness that could not happen any other way. If it leads us deeper—to questioning the meaning of life and that which does not die—even better. It is precisely these states of intense emotional pain that are the greatest sources of potential for development. They give us the strength to make changes we wouldn’t otherwise dare to make.
This is why I view suffering like an alchemist: I don’t recommend that a person simply free themselves from it, because the lead contains the raw material of future gold. If you remove the lead, you remove the gold. However, for alchemy to occur, one must understand the hidden gift within the pain. You must bring awareness to the way you think and react to the things that hurt you.
There is another equally important reason. It stems from my growing realization that the way to the surface often passes through hitting rock bottom. It’s as if we need to reach an extreme degree of intolerance toward a situation to let go of old patterns or the things we cling to. We jump out of the frying pan only when it truly starts to burn our feet. We drop our favorite “toy” only when our hands finally ache. We need to be bored to death with ourselves and our reactions before we finally do something different.
In my practice, I have encountered moments where the work with a client reaches a stalemate. Everything is understood and analyzed, yet the desired change remains elusive. Often, the only thing that “unblocks” the process is for things to worsen to the point of absolute intolerance. This is how I discovered the hidden, sabotaging aspect of change—the resistance of the old. These are the moments that call for the recommendation of “conscious presence in pain.” This simple thing, however, is the hardest to practice, for it requires extraordinary observation.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
