How Can I Stop Operating from Pain-Minimizing Mode?

If fear, frustration have been my driving force in life. How do you really change it to something that is coming from a calm headspace? How to make that shift? All old patterns doesn’t seem to go away and I have really forgotten how to be really in a calm state and all this feels really uncertain and messy

In this journey of growth, transformation and positive  change, very little is being asked of us in that all we really need to focus on is changing our belief system. Simple, but certainly not always easy, given our conditioning. 

What we are being asked to believe is the polar opposite of what we have been believing. We are being asked to adopt a thought system that is drastically different than the one from which we have been operating.

The key to making this shift in thinking, to adopting these new beliefs, to shifting our perception, is dealing with all our all emotional crap since that energy is a static, an interference that blocks us from seeing things more clearly, from connecting with truth on the heart level, not just intellectually. 

Those feelings, that energy, is like rain on a windshield that distorts our vision. It’s like a clog in a drain that blocks the flow of the beneficial energy from taking root more deeply within us. 

But the mind, given its commitment to operating from pain-minimizing mode, has little interest in delving into all that.

 It is much more interested in trying to arrange external circumstances in such a way that it believes will make those feelings go back dormant so they don’t disturb us anymore. 

For our whole lives, our mind has been operating under the delusion our circumstances are responsible for our feelings, and naturally this creates a great deal of attachment to certain desired manifestations. If you think you can’t feel better until you get it, the idea of not getting it is intolerable. 

Our mind is used to our pain being a motivator to go after the things we want, to change the things we want to change. It’s the straw that stirs the drink.

So naturally the idea of feeling better before anything changes, of accepting the idea your feelings and circumstances are not linked, is a HUGE threat to its agenda, and it fights us tooth and nail on embracing this core shift we must make if we are to achieve any real degree of peace and contentment in life, if we are to make the process of ‘receiving’ as easy as it is supposed to be. 

To go from our pain being the driving factor in trying to accomplish all that we wish to accomplish, to go from our primary goal being to minimize it as best as possible, to totally taking it out of the equation, can seem like a tall order, a nearly impossible task. 

But lo and behold, nothing can be further from the truth. But it will require us to actively participate in this process.

It will require us to choose in favor of this way of being, of a version of ourselves, that operates from a space of maximizing well-being, that is truly willing to embrace the beliefs that serve us, that is truly willing to live these ideas and let them inform our responses, our decisions, our actions and behaviors. 

Gotta Deal with the Pain

This is a common sentiment in much of my content regardless of the context because dealing with our feelings is going to factor into overcoming all the challenges we appear to face with personal growth in general, and energetic transformation specifically, especially in terms of changing our external circumstances in a way that is more to our liking. 

Our feelings are ever our only problem so dealing with them is always going to be the solution. Isn’t it nice to know there is only one problem and not the 50 your mind thinks?

Isn’t it nice to know energetic transformation isn’t some complex process you need to master, that it isn’t something that can be done right or wrong? It’s just dealing with the feelings that get in the way of choosing in favor of a thought system that serves us much better.

Want to be more detached? Gotta deal with the pain creating the attachment. Want to be happier overall? Gotta deal with the shit making you feel unhappy. Want to improve your relationships? Gotta take responsibility for your feelings and then deal with them accordingly. Starting to see a pattern? It’s all about the feelings.

We can never break free of pain-minimizing mode if we don’t deal with the pain in the various forms in which it comes–anger, fear, frustration, anxiety, bitterness, resentment, agitation, sadness, depression, overwhelm. 

As long as the pain remains dominant, it will always be the driver. Everything you want, everything you do will be about trying to get rid of it.

You will never break free of the delusional thought system of the ego ,which contends all this pain is due to your circumstances, and therefore, if you just manage to get everything you want, get rid of all the stuff you don’t, all will be well in your world. 

The intense attachment you may feel right now to getting a boyfriend, getting more money, making your business successful, losing the weight, achieving physical healing, getting a better job, or whatever else your mind has set its sights on, will never abate.

In fact, it will grow more intense the more time passes, because the more time that passes without it, the more scared you get you’re never going to get it. 

The harder you may try to ‘manifest,’ going on a wild goose chase through a variety of tools and techniques, plowing your way through a variety of ‘contexts’ through which you can ‘raise your vibration.’ 

You will likely take a  variety of actions that you believe will help, none of which are in alignment, and just worsen your ‘predicament, just worsen your emotional state. 

The funny thing about operating from pain-minimizing mode is it creates exponentially more pain–gotta love that mind of ours. 

Our feelings don’t come out of nowhere–there is a story, a narrative, a thought system that is creating these feeling responses. 

Where is the fear and frustration coming from? You feel badly without this thing or that thing; you feel badly about certain aspects of your life now. 

Why? 

What is the story there?

What tale is your mind weaving right now about the fact you are single, about how your body looks, about the state of your business now? 

Why is it so attached to these things? What does it fear will happen if you don’t get them?

What does the state of your life now say about you as a person? If you never ‘succeeded’ in getting these things, what would that mean about you as a person? 

You’re not going to want to ponder such questions but you must if you are to break free from pain-minimizing mode. 

We have to see where this pain is coming from. We have to let ourselves feel it so it no longer interferes. We have to unclog that drain. 

The ‘Stuff’ Can’t Be the Primary Motivator

For the vast majority of us, our interest in personal growth is largely driven by a desire to make our life better in a variety of ways. We have this ego/personality self for whom we want to make life more pleasant.

We want certain things we think will make it happy, will make life easier for it, will shield us from a host of unpleasant circumstances with which it doesn’t want to deal. If we commit to this growth and change, we will be in a much better position to create this more ideal life. 

We want to feel better of course, but it’s not really the PRIMARY focus. We see the cultivation of positive emotion, the emotional healing, not as the goal in and of itself, but a means to an end, a tool we can employ to craft our experience more to our liking,  a vehicle for fulfilling our ego preferences. 

Just is what it is, and most of us have to suffer through that at least a little bit, to see this isn’t what we are actually after. In this journey, we need to get a good taste of the ‘wrong’ way to truly see it’s the wrong way, and we can more confidently let it go, having seen the proof in our own experience. 

As far as teachings like the law of attraction, changing the outside is the SOLE interest that drew us to it. It is ALL about getting what we don’t have. 

And this journey of simply trying to attract what we don’t have amplifies all that pain right quick…it starts stirring up all the shit that lies at the root of the desire.

The sadness, the fear, the lack, the feelings of inadequacy and not being good enough, the desire to, prove something to someone, to prove all the bad things we think about ourselves must not be true. 

Right out the gate we are focused on the wrong thing, and it creates quite a bumpy, unpleasant ride. All we want is to feel better, to be free of our pain, and on some level we know this, but it can take a bit to make it our true focus. 

And while we tend to our emotional well-being to some degree because we now know how we feel impacts our reality, that feeling ‘better’ is the key to getting our beloved stuff, we are not making much headway. The focus is more on cultivating the positive feelings we are told will ‘raise’ our vibration and get us what we want.

We really aren’t focused on true inner transformation and healing; we really aren’t exploring our energy in the ways it needs to be explored. It is more surface and superficial–how could it not be? Feeling better isn’t our actual goal.

It is getting stuff we don’t have. That type of journey really can’t lend itself to the cultivation of the primary emotional states we deeply crave–peace, joy, security and the like. It won’t bring us to the places we need to go inside to get there in a real way.

 Opting for this journey will keep us in pain-minimizing mode, it will keep us externally focused, it will keep us trapped in that very action-oriented mode of personal growth where we feel like we must be constantly ‘doing’ something to effect inner change, where we falsely believe all that action will eventually get us something , will eventually facilitate some sort of inner shift. It will keep us locked into the belief that there is one external resource out there that will fix everything, and we just have to keep looking, keep trying everything.

Truly feeling better, truly transforming your energy, truly cultivating positive emotion that is lasting, truly operating from a new level energetically, truly healing, can never happen as long as improving our emotional health is employed as a tool to get stuff, to change the outside, rather than the primary motivation, the goal in and of itself. 

That is all you really care about, and tending to that primarily doesn’t mean giving up on changing the outside. Your mind sees a false choice between pursuit of emotional well-being or of your ‘stuff.’ And as we have all seen, we know which it chooses.

 If you choose the former, all bets are off. It is afraid you won’t go after what you want anymore. It is afraid you will settle for your life as it is now and all the stuff it doesn’t like won’t change. 

It doesn’t have an iota of understanding how your emotional/energetic state affects your reality, and that the more you transform the former, the more the latter will be transformed in all sorts of wonderful ways.  

It doesn’t understand how all its wants and needs, all the things with which it is concerned, are natural byproducts of that inner work, how they actually come much more easily, how you tend to get much better versions, how you let in all this other amazing stuff you didn’t even know you wanted. Again, gotta love the mind. 

It’s Your Call

Conscious choice of what we choose to believe is the crux of all this work. Like I said before, all that is being asked of us in this journey is to adopt a new thought system, a new belief system, a new way of looking at the world and ourselves. 

No tool, technique, program or particular ‘avenue’ of working with our energy, and emotions, can make us make that choice, can change our belief system.  They can’t make us change our perception. They can’t make our bad feelings magically go away.

 This is why I always talk about not relying on that stuff so much; that is why I always try to help people understand the role these things play, and what they can ,and can’t do for us. They can support us in many ways, but can’t do for us something we can only do for ourselves–decide what we believe. 

We can believe things that feel badly or believe things that make us feel good. We decide whether our intuitive resonance with these spiritual teachings, and advice of people who seem happy, wise and pretty damn peaceful, means we are touching on truth, or if it’s just wishful, deluded thinking. 

We get to make the choice to embrace the thought system of the ego which has created all this pain with which we are now contending, and desperate to cast off, or embrace the thought system of Spirit, God, or whatever term you like. 

We get to decide if we will prioritize our emotional healing and well-being (understanding all our ‘stuff’ will STILL come) or if we will remain externally focused, insisting we can only be happy if we get this or that, insisting our negative feelings are justified, and we get to feel that way, until things shape up more to our liking. 

We get to decide if we use challenging experiences as a springboard for growth, and inner exploration, or if we succumb to the ego interpretation that will leave us miserable, and in a constant state of resistance to ‘what is.’ 

We get to decide if we will deal with our feelings in a real way or if we will continue to suppress them; we get to decide if we will explore their true origins, or keep insisting they’re courtesy of our external circumstances, and huffing and puffing things aren’t the way we want them to be, and until such time we refuse to change our tun emotionally. 

These are actually very simple choices–again, not much is being asked of us. But it won’t always be easy. But if we accept it’s not always easy, it feels a lot easier. True story.

It all comes down to conscious choice–no one can take that away from us. No one can stop us from making these decisions, no one can else can control our belief system, or stop us from feeling our feelings. The ball has always been totally in our court, and always will be. 

Like the awesome-question asked noted–it can feel really messy sometimes. That’s normal. Embrace this journey in all its messiness.

It’s actually a thing of beauty when we drop the resistance to all those feelings, to see what we are capable of handling, to see how the pain serves its purpose, and can be just as welcome in this experience as the good stuff.

Your Turn

What did you think of the post? Anything resonate in particular? Anything you would add? Looking forward to your comments as always.

Work With Me

Courses

Coaching Call Library

Support My Work

The post How Can I Stop Operating from Pain-Minimizing Mode? appeared first on Life Made to Order.