I don’t think pain is going to be our main portal for growth anymore.
As a collective, we’re working hard right now on what we consider just. We’re working really hard on consensus about so many categories of injustice. We’re wondering what it might look like to not stack the deck against so many of our fellow humans.
In our personal growth and spiritual frameworks, we’re trying to integrate the collective social reality with our approaches to individual transformation. From my (limited) vantage point, we’re a little confused about what kind of suffering is unfair and needs to be changed and what kind of suffering is good and necessary for our growth. I’m wondering if we’ve become a little too acclimated to hard things being essential for us to grow. Really hard things happen to us of course, and all the ways we heal and recover and grow and learn to thrive should be really celebrated. Like a lot, a lot of celebrating and standing ovations. But I’m wondering about how we start dropping our expectation that this is the WAY. I fear we’ve become a little masochistic about growth. Even if we’ve learned to stop saying “everything happens for a reason,” I’m wondering if we still BELIEVE we have to have our ass kicked to grow because we’re so (stubborn, resistant, dense, impatient, fill in the blank). I’m wondering about how we get back in touch with how humans in our very nature like to grow. We don’t have to be forced into it, we don’t have to be coerced. We like to do it, it is our most natural state.
Let’s re-write this together. I trust you to grow. I trust myself to grow. Trauma, pain, and suffering may be present, but it is not the essential thing that makes it happen. You are.