Pain is Part of Every Chosen Path
One of my BJJ students asked me, “what do you do for pain in the shoulders, hands and toes?” I told him, “I usually just shut up about it but if it’s unbearable, then I’ll tape up the toes and finger or maybe take an ibuprofen before bed and up my water intake” He laughed and said, “no, really what do u do for the pain?” I looked at him again and told him, “no, that’s what I do.” “I just don’t give the pain more energy than its already taking but that’s it.”
The pain will not go away but when I remove my attention from the aching area, the pain seems to wane. It’s no different than cutting yourself and after you place the bandage on the wound, the pain seems to subside.
When I was in the Marines, one day my platoon was standing at attention in the summer sun for what felt like hours when some sort of bug landed on my eyebrow and began to do something that caused me to bleed. If you don’t know, while you are standing at attention, you can’t move a muscle, so knocking the bug off my face was not an option. While, I’m standing there trying not to move, the sweat from my brow passes through the bitten area and the bloody mixture entered the corner of my eye and caused my vision to turn a reddish blur and eye to burn. The annoyance of the biting bug and my burning eye begged my hand to quickly reach up and slap the irritated area, but right at that moment I felt I would explode, my drill instructor walked behind me and calmly said…. ”Don’t give it energy White” and immediately my mind abandoned its focus on the bugged area and my whole body relaxed …I felt better. I had accepted the pain and knew it wouldn’t last forever, but most important that it couldn’t rule that moment because something greater was at stake.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the old saying, “pain is weakness leaving your body” but pain is really a signal that something is not right and you need to stop doing whatever it is that’s hurting you. However, Jiu Jitsu is a combat sport and we call what we do “rolling,” “sparring” and “grappling” but its better known as fighting…and people get hurt in fights. And yes, this is the gentle art of fighting but there’s still some pain to be endured. I’ve lived long enough to have had periods where I was inactivity and weighed over 260lbs and pain was always present whether I was eating honey buns (plural) and washing them down with slim fast drinks each night or playing a double header at a rugby tournament. The pain is proportionate to the physical involvement because I never hurt my shoulder eating those honey buns but there was a constant pain in my back and knees while overweight when I played with my kids and my self-esteem hated the guy I was in the mirror. Pain is part of life, whether you participate or not. So you can either endure the pain now and stay focused or let it take your focus and steer you to a different form of pain… like the pain of the future regret for not doing something you really enjoyed when you could still do it but you were too concerned about the possibility of pain.
