The blissful pain amplifier

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Published in the series on Leadership Chronicles (Article # 23)

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How can one achieve one’s best without first becoming aware of one’s own self? If there is one utterly bitter medicine that makes you self-aware, I think it is you falling in love.

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I often recall a past version of mine which had a lot of jealousy and fear etc. And that version was absolutely fine with having such jealousy and fear. It was fine to an extent that it was driven by its jealousies and insecurities. Till the time, an experience of love heightened those fears, jealousies, insecurities, and so many other weaknesses that I was not even aware I had. Such feelings became so apparent and magnified that it became impossible to live with those. I was driven to a corner where only one could have survived: either myself or my weaknesses.

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It took me decades of time-waste and the episode above to know that my greatest enemy was always hidden inside me. The only reason I could not achieve my potential was my own self. And while suffering during those terrible years of pain, I became more aware of myself. I don’t know what the future is, but I can definitely tell you that it will only be I who defines it.

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To truly understand this as a tool that magnifies your weaknesses and separates them from your true self, you have to look at the example of a pain killer. The job of a pain killer is to mute the pain. The side effect of the pain killer is that you lose the incentive to find the root cause of the pain. You will rarely cure the cause because you have subsided the symptoms. This pain killer is what we have everyday in our life, and our greatest weaknesses remain a part of us. ?

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Now, think of an “anti pain killer”. What if there is a tablet that just amplifies your pain to such an extent that you feel the pain at the level of a tiny droplet of blood. I bet that you will cry having such tablet but this tablet will make you aware of the tiniest part in your body. You would not be able to tolerate the torture, but you will know (or truly become aware) of the deepest weaknesses of your body.

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Only with the help of a strong will to endure the pain, you will find a cure. And once you have solved it (not by suppressing the pain but by genuinely finding a cure of it), your body will be able to function better. This would be an experience of torture only, but the pain would make you become self-aware, and do the struggle.

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You would have, most definitely, seen people crying when they are in love. Love is like that pain amplifier for our true self. The weaknesses in our inner self come to the fore when we are in love. All of our inner strengths and weaknesses are heightened when we are in love. This is true for love of any kind – not necessarily of a human being. Some would even say that it is rarely present and wrongfully considered to be in the traditional definitions of love for a human being.

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Pain in love is excruciating but we live through it rather than having a pain killer that would kill our love. If you have been in love, you would recall that your biggest fear might have been of losing the feeling of love. While in love, you would cry and you would curse yourself to be in it, but you would never leave the ground. That is how it is made sure that you are able to live through a process of finding cure to your weaknesses while you have had your pain amplifiers. Without the love, it would take you a minute to find the pain killer. It is only love that makes you go through it.

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We are made of good and bad simultaneously. In our work life, our good parts help us achieve success while the bad parts in us stop us from achieving what we are meant to be. Since these two co-exist from the day of our birth, we inherently are incapable of separating the good from the bad. For example, it is entirely impossible for someone to separate one's jealousies from their inspirations. I would even say that distinguishing the two is very difficult for almost all of us. The only few who can distinguish the two are those who are conscious of their inner self.

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I have started to believe that no one can achieve his / her potential unless he or she is aware of him or herself. And the easiest way nature has to make one person become aware of himself / herself is through making him / her fall in love. The truth is that the passion in love can only be called madness. The determination in love can only beaten by death (or not even by death). The craziness of love makes creators invent things. Lack of access to talk to your love makes you a writer and poet. When someone loved to fly, he invented a flying machine and found the dare to sit in that without any regard of his life. How else would have all humanity learnt to fly if one crazy scientist did not love doing it!

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I am not aware of anything else that makes us self-aware. May be some reader can recommend some mind exercises, but I am actually not aware of anything effective and successful. So, lets all just find our passions, find reasons to fall in love with what we really love, and lets all ignore everything else that stops us from doing it.