Regardless of what the title may have lead you to believe, this is not about working out...well not exactly.
The other night I'm on the phone with a friend of mine and we're talking about changes that have happened in our lives. And we get on the subject of pain. I said to her that pain was necessary without it we'd have no growth. Then I threw out this analogy:
When you lift weights to build muscle, the actual building of the muscle doesn't happen until you're recovering from the damage that the weight lifting does. When you lift weights, you put tiny tears in your muscles. During rest, while your body repairs all of the damage from the day, your muscles become slightly bigger to bridge the tears that you've put in them.
When you suffer some sort of emotional turmoil. You don't grow while you're feeling the pain of it. You don't grow stronger until afterwards, when you have to recover from this pain. You have to repair your heart to recover from the pain, and in so doing you become stronger than before.
Each kind of pain has it's own kind of recovery. Loss of a job has a different recovery process than loss of a friend or family member, a break up after 6 months is considerably different than a break-up after 5 years. However, the process is more than likely the same, the duration of your recovery could be very different.
But how, you may ask, could any of these losses be considered joyful?
I'm glad you asked! If we went through life and never suffered any loss, no emotional turmoil, no pain at all...how would we know what joy felt like? If you have nothing to compare it to, then joy is just the status quo. Although it can be extraordinarily painful at times, a life without contrast wouldn't be extraordinary at all, it would be decidedly ordinary, mundane, flat, life...less.
Although I believe that we must feel some pain to some degree, I am the last person that wants to wallow in it. I have known some incredible wallowers in my time. I admire their ability to milk every misery out of a situation. I am no good at it. I am looking for a way to move out of misery as quickly as possible.
The quickest way is to figure out what you feel, then why you feel it. If you cannot change the outcome to something more favorable, why would you continue to relive it over and over again? As grateful as I am for pain and what it can teach me, I am also glad to get back to my joy. So, I do everything I can to work through it to start feeling joyful again.
Yes, I understand that the depths of the pain will dictate, to some degree, how long it will take to recover. But, I also understand that part of that recovery begins the day that you are looking toward feeling better and away from how awful you feel. Looking toward the joy helps you find it sooner.
So, let's do an experiment. I want you to look back at a time when you felt some degree of pain. This is not about revisiting that pain. This is about approaching your recovery from it. This example painful time, how long did it take you to recover from it? What steps did you take to move forward with your life? How long did it take before you got to the point of moving forward? How long afterwards was it before you remember actually feeling joyful again (without any artificial substance assistance)? Are you pleased with your answers? How could you have approached your recovery differently?
The thing to remember is that you will not have a life free from pain. The sooner you are ready to rest and recover from it, the sooner you can get to rebuilding and becoming stronger. It's time to flex those joy muscles and put the weights you've been carrying down. Give yourself time to rest and the next time you have to carry the weight of the world on your sholders it won't seem nearly as heavy.
Until next time friends...
Joyfully yours,
Robyn
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