Pain, work always precedes pleasure. It’s a divine law. When you’re about to give birth (the ultimate experience of materialization), you go into “labor”. Work must be done before you get to experience the pleasure of seeing your baby for the first time.
Pain and pleasure, two experiences, each at the opposite end of the spectrum, tell us a lot about the concept of duality and contrast. Contrast makes creation and experiences possible. If everything was all black, you would see nothing. If everything was all white, you would see nothing. It’s the contrast between the two that gives shape and form to things so we can distinguish them, which means that balance is needed in all. In the same way, pain cannot be dissociated from pleasure. To get to one, you must go through the other.
Understanding this concept help us develop a better relationship with pain. Pain is the one thing that we humans avoid. We’re so scared of it, and because we are, we miss out on opportunities, dreams, not knowing that the realization of our desires is on the other side of pain. The pleasure lies beyond the hard work needed to accomplish our goals and make our dreams mental pictures manifest.
This is something that took me a while to get comfortable with because I noticed that I actively avoided pain. And the reason why is because I felt like I suffered enough. I felt like the challenges that I had gone through before were enough to cover my share of pain for a lifetime, and that I was at a point in my life where I deserved and only needed to deal with positive and good things. But one thing I realized is that true liberation happens when you embrace pain. Pain isn’t only a catalyst to suffering – it is also and maybe more importantly, a door to opportunities and beauty.
All projects I’ve worked on? I experienced pain before enjoying the pleasure of success. During go-live, I would savor the taste of having accomplished something great with my team, but it happened with a tremendous amount of consistent effort over a long period of time.
I watched a documentary called “con mum” and it tells a story of a chef whose mother abandoned him when he was younger. Later, when she resurfaced, he was a 45 year old man, scarred by the absence of his mom, but also a man, desperate to live and experience the feeling of having your mom’s love. While he got to experience it, he also lived the feeling of being deceived, since it turned out that his mom was a scammer who took advantage of him emotionally and financially.
Was the feeling of having his mother’s love (even if for a brief moment) worth the pain she put him and his family through? Maybe it was. Maybe the pleasure felt was worth the pain caused.
I also recently renovated our living room. The renovation included painting the main door, baseboards and stairs as well as changing the couch. I remember how painful it was having to sand the wood, add a primer and finally paint ( with multiple layers). The work was laborious, painful even but once I was done, a great joy enveloped my heart. I was pleased with the result (see below for a picture of what it looks like now). The joy of the final result came with the pain of the work. They couldn’t be separated.
The question for us should now be, what experience which pleasure is worth experiencing the pain? The pain of labor to see your baby, the pain of discipline to see the results of a weight loss, the pain of concession to see the result of a happy mariage.
Pain cannot be separated from pleasure. Duality cannot be escaped, it should be embraced.
Without duality, there is no experience. Problems arise when we try to take shortcuts and seek pleasure before experiencing pain.
This is a divine law. It is inescapable.
