Avoiding Pain - a podcast by David K Payne

“Embrace those parts of yourself that you've skillfully avoided until now. That's your true adventure.” 
― Gina Greenlee, Postcards and Pearls: Life Lessons from Solo Moments on the Road.

One of the traps I have been tempted to fall into lately is attempting to avoid certain pains by avoiding the situations that brought the pain at earlier times in my life. For the person who has been wounded when they opened up to love or trust someone else, it might be thought I can avoid that pain by avoiding relationships that require me to love or trust someone again.

Life experiences can hurt. They hurt so severely that naturally, we would want to avoid those experiences again. The problem is that whenever we build walls to protect ourselves, those same walls trap us and keep us from fully finding an authentic life.  It might be a good time to revisit what I mean by an authentic life. I wrote earlier that an authentic life is A manner of living that is emotionally appropriate, significant, purposeful and responsible. In an authentic life, we are fully engaged in the human experience with all the high’s, lows, successes, and challenges, but we are living in a healthy mental and emotional way that produces good things for us and those we interact with. If we begin avoiding specific experiences in life, we starve the areas of our lives those experiences are intended to feed growth into.

I remember when my daughter first announced that she was expecting a child, I became upset. I was upset because I had lived most of my life feeling a lot of responsibility for children at an early age. My daughter and my son were both on their own and were experiencing success in their life, and I felt I was finally off the responsibility hook. I could finally pursue what I wanted to do, I could buy what I wanted for myself. I was looking never to feel responsible for anything or anyone else again. As you can already understand, I had some serious internal issues that I had never dealt with but wrongly resented the fact that I would now have someone else I felt responsible for. WOW was I in for a surprise. My first grandchild was a little boy who is now 11 years old and is one of the most significant sources of love and joy I have ever experienced in my life. When he was five years old, I remember taking him to a local Japanese restaurant to eat, and he looked up at me and with nothing but love in his eyes said, Poppy you Rock!

 At that moment I realized that this kid, whom I had no real responsibility for, fed life into me in a way I had never experienced before. But what if I had refused to be a part of his life. What if I had selfishly cut myself off from that experience? The truth is I had a justification for what I felt. I became a father at 18, a pastor at 25 and it had felt as though all I ever did was give and seemingly the ones I gave the most to, demanded the most and gave the least back. I was becoming bitter and resentful and had I allowed that to cause me to withhold myself from this kid, I would have cheated myself out of one of the most incredible experiences of my life.

Let me challenge you to look at the experiences of your life that have caused you great pain with little reward. Consider those experiences you had closed yourself off from and just consider once more whether you are making the right decision by transferring the pain of the experience to the experience itself when it was more about you not being prepared for the experience and taking responsibility for your own decisions. Don’t be afraid to love trust and live… It’s worth it. We have one life, so live it to its fullest. Don’t avoid living, step up to the plate and assume responsibility for you and trust that voice inside that is trying to guide you in your decisions.

Just Be

David  

 

Further episodes of "the DKP Word"

Further podcasts by David K Payne

Website of David K Payne