There is something incredible about pain. Most evolutionary biologists think of pain in terms of it’s ability to motivate virtually all human action, parallel to pleasure. Two think that these two motivators are behind all human behavior is of course absurd, which I’ll delineate in another post, but for the sake of briefly explaining where I’m going with this, humans are infinitely more complex creatures than we once ever thought possible.
First there was the atom. “The single building block of all life!,” we thought. Then there came photons, quarks, gluons, oh my! Now, thanks to the Large Hadron Collider (a giant particle accelerator that shoots two high-energy beams of tiny, ultra-microsopic matter at each other through ultra-high vacuum tubes and around superconducting electromagnets at -271.3 degrees Celsius, which is colder than space,) we have discovered…drum roll…the Pentaquark.
But none of that matters. Why? Because as it concerns pleasure and pain, they have nothing to do with being “the primary motivators of human behavior.” The truth is that you’re not a squirrel. You’re a human being. How do I know? Because you just read that sentence. How do you like that for psychic skills? Truthfully though, the takeaway needs to be thus; you are motivated by far more than pleasure and pain.
So what place do they have?
Show me one single person who graduated from the marine core who isn’t a better man than the one he was when he walked in, and I’ll stop typing. But since you can’t, I’ll continue this post. And frankly, it has nothing to do with patriotism or nationalism. It has to do with pain.
Every single time you have a limiting belief about yourself – like that you can’t get over that hurdle, that you can’t tackle that opponent, that you can’t reach that destination – and you prove yourself wrong…you are growing. You are proving to yourself that all of those deep, dark, and insidious lies you fed to yourself over the years about what you couldn’t achieve were bullshit, and that you could accomplish far more than you ever thought possible. You stared your pain, and your demons, square in the face, eye to eye, and you said, knuckle up, bitch. We’re about to throw down, and find out who is the bigger of the two of us. And every single time you did that and came up on top, you proved your superiority over your fears. That is what pain does for men and women. It makes you strong. Not because you’re in the army. But because you learn to conquer your fears and test your limits. You learn a little more than you once knew about what it means to be a human being by expanding your possibilities.
Too much of anything can be bad, but just the right amount of anything can likewise be good. Pain can be a beautiful thing if used properly. Nothing else can give you more power, more satisfaction, and more experience, than by pushing through pain and through fear, and winning over them. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking in a physical sense, or a spiritual sense. For those of you who are suffering from spiritual attacks or feel a sense of fear, do you realize that this is the channel through which your afflictions have a way into your psyche in the first place? Those sparks of your unconscious mind that we call demons that nag at us and make us feel fear… we manifest them and have the power over them. Have you ever noticed how people who don’t believe in anything aren’t affected by the fear of spiritual matters? This is why. But I digress.
One of the most motivational people I know is Gregg Plitt. A lot of what I’m saying here is embodied in his message, that’s how powerful this message is. If you just embrace the message in this post, you’ll understand everything Gregg Plitt was trying to teach. Here’s a clip of him explaining these concepts, and applying them to the physical self.
My message, though a bit more broad as it embodies mental, spiritual and emotional parameters, is essentially the same. Your body is a reflection of all that is possible in the emotional, spiritual, and mental plane. Just as your body is able to adapt and expand, or shrink and withdraw, so too are your spiritual, mental and emotional capacities. But if you don’t stretch them, they will never live up to their potential.
So the next time you feel immobilized by the fear of making a difficult decision, or by the insecurities that at times find their way into our minds, rebuke those fears and give it your best. You will grow, you will conquer, and you will become your highest and best self.
I’d love to hear what you guys think in the comments below.
