Reframe Pain

Reframe Pain So this principle is a little bit of a catch-all instruction.

The idea is that if you come across a block,

A barrier,

A pain point or a loss,

There will be a reframe that you can twist it and change it and tweak it to your advantage that will leave you at peace and with renewed purpose.

This is like the idea of a silver lining,

The idea of finding the good amongst the bad.

There are many different iterations of this and I'll give you a few,

But the principle here is to discover them for yourself.

There is something good about every situation you can learn.

And I guess this is the first one here.

You win or you learn.

No matter what's happening,

No matter what block arises,

No matter what barrier or pain point or anything that comes,

It is an opportunity for learning and growth.

At worst,

At worst whatever is going on right now,

Whatever is happening between you and the world,

You are learning,

You are experiencing.

This moment is the only moment that ever exists and you can get something positive from it.

You can see the silver lining.

There is a reframe that I would like to suggest to you that I learned during a silent retreat.

I was put into a room to sleep at night and there was someone snoring and I'm a light sleeper and I'm like,

Oh my god,

How am I going to deal with this?

And I realized,

I was saying in my mind,

I have to deal with this.

But then I realized the reframe.

It's like,

No,

No,

I get to.

Over the next 10 days,

I get to learn how to deal with snoring people near me.

I get to learn how to sleep deeply because I would never have taken that step and that choice to sleep in a room with someone snoring if I could help it.

In fact,

I do everything I can to ensure silence when I sleep.

So I reframed the idea.

I have to becomes I get to.

I get to improve myself.

That didn't stop the negative feelings.

It didn't make me feel any less comfortable in that space,

But it diminished the power of those thoughts and gave me something to look forward to because from that point on,

Oh,

I can sleep well no matter what comes.

That's almost like a superpower,

Right?

I have to becomes I get to.

Another good one that I learned was to live by the principle of charity.

In the past,

Based on my past and my conditioning,

I would always feel like the world is out to get me,

Like people are judging me,

Looking at me,

Criticizing me.

But the reality is,

Is that they're probably not thinking of me.

The reality is,

Is that most likely it's my interpretation of the situation based on my past is causing me to think that way.

Most likely ambiguous information of their tone,

Of their voice,

Of their facial structure,

Of whatever's happening was being interpreted by me in a way that suggested that they were negative,

That they had ill will.

But the reality is,

Is that I don't know.

The reality is,

Is that most of the time people are neutral or in fact positive.

And the moment I decided to give everyone the principle of charity,

To basically,

Whenever I didn't realize,

Whenever there was ambiguity,

Or a lack of understanding or knowledge,

To just assume the best,

99% of my relationships improved.

I started feeling better because I wasn't judging everyone as negative.

And they saw it.

Because here's the thing,

If I'm thinking you're going to be to me,

Then my body language,

My tone,

My everything becomes defensive.

I put up a wall,

You see that wall,

You put up your wall,

And now yeah,

You are a bit worried about me,

You are judging me,

Because you're vibing off my vibe.

So if I have a mental reframe,

That I'm just going to assume the best,

Then you will see that in me,

And you will assume the best,

And then we're vibing together.

Now the caveat here is that obviously,

There are some things and some places and some people that you do have to protect yourself in,

Fair enough.

But I was talking about the ambiguous situations,

The places where I don't know.

Because even when people seem outwardly hostile or negative,

I have no idea what's going on in their mind.

Someone cuts me off in traffic or is rude to me in a shop or some other situation.

Online perhaps.

I don't know.

I'm going to choose to think the best.

I'm going to choose to assume that it's something going on in their mind that has nothing to do with me,

And I just happen to be the one that was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The principle of charity states that we give people the benefit of the doubt.

And the same is true for ideas.

It's a philosophical discussion or concept where you just hold certain truths,

And then you debate around a certain point,

Given those truths.

Because if you can't come to a place of agreement,

You can't discuss.

If you can't discuss,

There's no philosophy,

Right?

This idea is that you give people the principle of charity.

You assume the best until they prove you wrong,

Until there's unequivocal evidence that people are out to get you,

That they have ill will towards you.

Because most of the time,

In my experience,

99% of interactions are positive,

Particularly if I assume they're going to be.

It's funny how the world is almost like a mirror to my soul.

How I feel on the inside is projected on the faces of strangers.

If I speak in a happy tone,

If I smile,

People speak and are happy back to me.

So I'm going to choose to act like that if I can.

This isn't a contradiction about the idea of living honestly.

Because if I,

It's sort of more of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I could choose to think one way.

If I can choose to think the other way,

Then I'll make that choice,

Because that leads to a better outcome for all involved.

And of course,

If I'm not in the ability of the mind frame to think better,

And my honest truth in that moment is one of fear,

Is one of sadness,

Then that's my honest truth.

But if I go back to number two,

And I know and accept myself,

Then in that moment,

I know that that's what I'm like,

And I can take actions to address it accordingly.

Do you see how we're working to pull ourselves from surviving to thriving?

A survival person,

Someone that's in that survival mind frame just exists.

Someone that is thriving attempts to reframe the situation to best benefit everyone around them and themselves.

Another one of these is,

You shouldn't fill the blank spaces with the worst memory.

If you've had a challenging past,

Where there's blank spaces and issues in your past,

You may be tempted to think the worst.

Why?

You don't know what happened.

It's a blank space.

Give your past self,

Your past events,

Past instances,

The benefit of charity.

Something might have happened,

But you don't know.

So don't think the worst.

There are a few more.

One of them is around the idea of life itself being meaningless.

People get this existential angst,

You know,

Religious and non-religious alike,

Particularly for the agnostics and the atheists among us.

But everyone in general is like,

What's the point?

This all ends.

Well,

What do we know?

What do we know?

How can we reframe this?

It's pointless because it ends.

No,

It's not pointless because it exists.

All we know is that right now,

This moment is all that exists.

It is the single point of light between darkness.

That makes it important.

That makes it the most important thing.

And even if you believe there is an afterlife,

This life,

This moment,

This now is all that exists for you now.

That makes it the important thing.

So whether or not you have a belief in an afterlife or not,

The feelings of life being meaningless can be abated by the idea that yes,

You're not sure what happened beforehand if anything existed or afterwards.

But right now you do know that this moment exists.

That is truth and therefore it has meaning.

And the final one of mine that I want to share with you is the issue that some people find,

The philosophical trap they get stuck in around solipsism or free will.

Solipsism is the idea that you can't prove that anything exists beyond yourself.

You could be a brain in a jar being fed and zapped with prods to produce sound and vision and all the other things.

You could be in Plato's cave seeing shadows upon a wall.

You don't know.

You could be stuck in the matrix.

You don't know.

And alternatively,

Or combining with that,

You don't know if you have free will.

Do you have the ability to choose or not?

Is it dictated by an external god or fate or chance or whatever?

The banging of molecules together.

Atoms set in motion from the big bang.

These are traps that some people fall into and they get really stuck and overwhelmed by them.

But the answer to it is this.

You can't prove it either way.

You can't prove whether or not you have or don't have free will.

You can't prove whether or not you are a brain in a vat or just stuck in Plato's cave watching the shadows.

You can't prove it.

But what you can do is act regardless.

You can take actions assuming you have free will.

Assuming that the world exists beyond your perception.

Act as if.

Take the steps to do and thrive.

Now if some of those things don't resonate with you,

If you're not stuck in those areas,

Fine.

That's not the point.

The point of this session is to give you ideas of how you can reframe your pain.

There'll be aspects in your life,

Things that you're stuck upon,

That you've discovered upon knowing and accepting yourself,

That you've discovered by introspecting,

That you've discovered through meditation,

That you've discovered through self-work,

Through shadow work,

That you're going to be stuck on.

It could be a block about your past,

About your person,

About who knows what.

But there will be a way to reframe it and to act accordingly.

I have,

And other people have,

And you have in the past as well,

Pushed through blocks that seemed overwhelming.

Internal,

Philosophical,

Logical,

Or emotional traps.

Conditionings of the past.

It is possible to reframe it,

To reframe the pain,

And push on and thrive.

Because you might have gotten yourself to a place of surviving,

But to thrive,

You need to address these blocks proactively.

It is all on you to do so.

Now you can read,

You can listen to things like what we've got going on here,

You can speak to people,

You can ask for help,

And you can take those steps,

But once again it is on you to do that.

It is on you to gather that information and those resources,

And it's on you to integrate it.

It's on you to look inwards and find these blocks and push through them.

There's an idea of a poverty mindset.

People who grew up poor and have habits and ideas instilled into them about what that means.

A relationship to money,

To self-worth,

To agency,

To all of these things.

And it blocks them,

And it stops them.

But that would be a shame.

I encourage you to take time to identify these blocks and to find the reframe,

And if you can't find it yourself,

To seek help to do so.

Because there are reframes that you can find,

And you need to if you want to thrive.

This track is taken from my course,

From Surviving to Thriving.

10 Principles to Turn Your Life Around.

It's out now and available on my InsightTimer profile.

I invite you to check it out.