Physical pain shows us where we're hurt. Emotional pain also teaches us.
My daughter once asked me which superpower I would rather have.
I don't remember all the options. But I do know one of them was 'you would never feel any pain when you got hurt.'
That's the power she would pick.
I told her that might be nice, but it would also be very dangerous. You could get cut and bleed to death and not even know it.
"Pain is there for a reason," I told her. "It protects us."
At the time, I was also going through some pain.
Our life was in a place that I did not like and it hurt. Really bad.
I realized what had caused it -- small errors in judgment, repeated over time.
I was kicking myself for making those mistakes.
But as I told my daughter about how dangerous it would be to 'not feel the pain', I realized it applied to my situation too.
As much as I didn't like it, I knew that without the pain I would probably continue on the path of making small errors in judgment.
The pain caused me to 'wake up' and to take action to 'stop the bleeding'.
Embrace the pain in your life.
It hurts for a reason. It's telling you there is something wrong.
Your job is to figure out what that is and then do what you need to do to stop it.
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