Today marks my complete rehabilitation from a painful event. I was working at my parents house helping them clean up after a small construction project. The sun was beating down on everything and I just wanted to get away from it so I didn’t bother looking for a hammer to flatten nails,relying on gravity and concrete instead.
What happened next is ironic when you consider that recently I’ve been reading books like the The Law of Attraction and The Four Agreements and then the result of my meditations on these works was a question: What is the difference between pain and discomfort? And I decided that I wanted to find a personal answer and believed that I would. The Universe does indeed give you what you ask for even if you don’t want it.
This question about pain and discomfort was raised in my mind after reading a passage in The Law of Attraction that explains how we have physical bodies in order to experience change over, or through, time towards the things we want. The book explains that Time is not a barrier but an opportunity to experience change as limited three-dimensional beings. Even so any amount of time can allow for distractions from what we want. My personal distractions, or vices, come in the form of habits that lean towards instant gratification and going against these habits is Uncomfortable.
The heat of the day continues to cook my skin and boil my brain as I prepare to stomp a board with the nail heads pointing up. STOMP the nails bend easily against the concrete and I throw the wood on the garbage pile. I get ready to quickly stomp another board and to get closer to getting out of this heat.
Pain, I reasoned, could just be something we experience when a part of ourselves is damaged and needs to be able to heal. As I began reading these books I’ve come to realize that I have developed a deeply rooted belief, unspoken even to myself, that Discomfort was the same as Pain and I began to habitually shy away from anything that made me Uncomfortable if it was possible. I would rationalize this behavior with further beliefs like nothing good could come from being uncomfortable.
This is the last board. I’m so close to a climate controlled room I can taste it. STOMP The nails didn’t bend this time and the board flush against my foot and I pick it up. The board clatters to the ground with a nail that is slick and red. I'm in absolute disbelief and I think “ Did I really just...” as I'm taking off my shoe and sure enough there is a bloody yet cleanly punched hole in the sole of my foot. I went inside immediately after that, thanking my lucky stars that these were clean nails so I wasn’t likely to get tetanus.
With this “accident” I got what I asked for more than once. I got to go inside, out of the heat, and I got a reminder about the difference between Discomfort and Pain.
All pain is uncomfortable but not all discomfort is painful in that it is a sensation signaling damage and something requires healing. Personal Discomfort is actually a gift from your soul trying to inform you that you have started concentrating on something you don't want and you have started to attract it into your experience.
Pain:http://naturalknowledge247.com/pain-tolerance/
Watch out for nails:https://www.123rf.com/photo_20410973_warning-sign-protruding-nails.html