Success & Martial Arts: Dealing with Emotional and Physical Pain, Part 1
Introduction – Be emotionally and physically tough!
How do you achieve success? It depends on how tough you are. What gives one person the grit to keep fighting through intense injury? What makes another give up at a broken nail? The difference is how they handle the pain. Read on to find out how you handle pain, and you can build some formidable confidence and self esteem, and conquer some of the biggest obstacles to success in both life and martial arts.
Before we begin, let’s make a distinction. The injury is what happens to us (a divorce, a broken arm). Pain is what makes us suffer. The key is separating the injury from the pain.
Isn’t pain what many of us suffer from - either emotional or physical? It is impossible to go through life without suffering some emotional injury. Some people don’t suffer physical pain daily, but a lot do, due to an illness or an injury. What about athletes, martial artists, or people who work in physical jobs? They will benefit from learning to deal with pain as well.
How do we approach it? How do we reduce it? More importantly, how do we overcome it as an obstacle to our goals?
Note: Healing the pain is a different matter; you can find tools for emotional pain in my Emotional Mastery section at the Urban Monk website - while physical pain requires a health professional, or maybe just a bandaid.
Step one: Separate the injury from the pain
There is a veteran professional boxer at the gym I train at, and I was sparring him a while ago. I hit him with my best shots and he kept coming – he was a man renowned for his toughness, and that was the first time I had experienced it firsthand. When he finished with me, I asked him for his secret, and he obliged in his own rough way, with a simple statement. “I just don’t react to it. I think about, I acknowledge it, but I don’t feel it.”
And that’s it. He doesn’t feel the pain. Not to say that it isn’t there, but he doesn’t let it affect him, nor does he react to it. He takes note of it – “OK, he hit me with an uppercut when I did this, I will have to watch out for the next time”, and he keeps going.
Does that mean he can’t be hurt? Are you crazy? He has been knocked out in professional bouts before. But the injury stopped him, not the pain. This bears repeating: The injury is what happens to you. The pain is what you feel about the injury.
Step one for emotional pain
Notice how this applies to all kinds of emotional pain as well, and in fact emotional pain is easier to deal with in this manner. Let’s say you lose your job. The injury is the loss of income and stability. The pain is the fear of the future, fear of the unknown, fear of having to survive on savings, fear of what your spouse would say; the list goes on.
Would you like to live in bliss and find success in any calling?
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