How Gratitude Turns Pain Into Power

This newsletter is sponsored by pain. Not just this newsletter specifically, but pretty much everything I've ever written as well. Aside from grace, pain takes the bulk of the credit for the transformation that shifted my life from something that happens to me without my consent to something that happens for me with my appreciation. Pain is not punishment for making the wrong decisions in life. Pain is a fact of life–a tool of life that helps guide us in the direction of our deepest fulfillment because what pain is at its core is a call to make ourselves whole again. And if we can muster the courage to sit with pain for days, weeks, months, or years, eventually we'll find ourselves with a deeper capacity for life, less fear, more hope, and a resilience to not just face whatever life throws at us but to embrace it with the understanding that it's for our highest good.

I have a bit of a strange relationship with pain in how I'd rather feel it than force it to go away. For instance, as I write this I have a splitting headache yet I won't take anything for it because I intentionally don't own any pain medication. I guess you could say that I have a high pain threshold, which certainly helps, but more than a high tolerance for pain, I have a high interest in pain—so before I chase it away, I first want to explore if there's anything I can learn from it.

The line between pleasure and pain is a lot thinner than we'd probably like to admit. I currently have seven tattoos, and each of them hurt to have etched into my skin, yet each also brought a deep sense of satisfaction and meaning to my life through the pain they caused and what they represent. I think getting tattooed is a type of alchemy that allows us to transmute pain from deep inside—pain that we didn't get to choose, pain that likely didn’t have much meaning at the time we received it—into pain we did control, pain we did choose, and pain that does have meaning. In this sense, getting tattooed is the perfect example of turning pain into personal power.

Similarly, if we can learn to take ownership of all the pain in our lives, whether we are responsible for it or not, then fearlessness becomes easy because what underlies all fears is the fear of pain. But if we can understand that pain is not an enemy, an obstacle, or a punishment but instead is a path back to wholeness, then pain loses its power to intimidate us. It becomes a teacher instead of a tormentor, a guide rather than a barrier. When we see pain this way, we no longer resist it or run from it; instead, we meet it with curiosity and openness. Every ache, every scar—physical or emotional—becomes an invitation to grow, to heal, and to evolve.

If you're reading this, I wouldn't be surprised if there are parts of yourself that you feel are missing and that you'd like to reclaim. What is likely blocking you from reintegrating those parts of yourself is that they are currently locked behind a wound that, up until this point, has not seemed worth the pain of revisiting. But my hope is that after reading what follows, you'll understand that pain is almost always a call for increased awareness and that if we can learn to be grateful for this call we'll gain the power to reveal those hidden parts of ourselves and bring them back into the light. Pain, when met with gratitude and curiosity, transforms from a source of avoidance into a doorway to healing. By answering this call with courage, we begin to dissolve the barriers that keep us fragmented and we take the whole, fulfilled, content, actualized version of ourselves from our dreams and bring them into reality.

The Growth Zone

High performers across all disciplines have one thing in common and that is a familiarity with pain. In fact, I don't think it's farfetched to assert that the bulk of the supposed 10,000 hours it takes to build mastery in any discipline are filled with pain in varying degrees of intensity. Now, don't get me wrong, this pain is not always at a 10. I don't think any human being, perhaps short of David Goggins, has a nervous system that can handle that level of pain sustainably. But the moderate pains of waking up early, training while sore, skipping out on junk foods, and saying 'no' to other convenient pleasures are not just encouraged but required in order to be great at anything.

Something else that sets these high performers apart and something I think we all can learn and integrate into our own disciplines is understanding that pain that is overcome brings a certain satisfaction of its own. A satisfaction that boosts confidence, reinforces resilience, and cultivates a deep sense of self-respect. This satisfaction is not superficial or fleeting; it’s the kind that comes from knowing you’ve stretched beyond your comfort zone, done something hard, and come out stronger on the other side. High performers don’t just tolerate pain—they appreciate pain in the sense that they understand its value. They see each discomfort, each sacrifice, as a necessary investment in their growth.

In fact, when it comes to lifting weights, there’s such a thing as the 'growth zone,' where, for best results, it’s advised to perform repetitions of an exercise until you’re about one or two repetitions short of failure. This 'growth zone' is likely where you’ll start to feel the most intensity—a burn in the muscle group you’re working—and this burn is a key indication that you’re achieving your goal: breaking the muscle down so that it can grow back stronger. Eventually, this burn, albeit physically painful, becomes psychologically pleasurable. We learn to be grateful for this burn because we know that its presence is proof we are getting closer to achieving our goals.

Similarly, when we intentionally revisit emotional wounding from our past we enter a another kind of 'growth zone'—one where the intensity of discomfort correlates with the opportunity for healing and transformation. This emotional lifting is a key to developing a strength that allows us to exist in the world with a sense of lightness. There are certain aspects of life that will always be heavy: loss, death, decay, destruction, suffering, etc. But when we intentionally work to develop mental and emotional strength, these inevitabilities become much easier to co-exist with. When we learn to be grateful for the emotional 'burn' that comes from working out our past traumas, it transforms the pain of those traumas from a source of suffering into a source of power and shows us that we have the capacity to lift and hold so much more than we originally thought.

However, just like lifting physical weights, we don't want to overdo it by lifting too much too soon. Instead we should go to that place where it just starts to feel uncomfortable and start there—slowly working our way deeper as we gain strength. It may even be beneficial to employ a 'spotter' to assist us with our emotional lifting. This could be a spiritual guide, a therapist, a trusted friend, or anyone you feel is qualified to help you bear the weight. Personally, I found a lot of peace and power in the living words of some dead friends who had the wherewithal to chronicle their own experience with pain and suffering in their books before they died. As James Baldwin beautifully said:

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

And that is the biggest reason why I write: as an act of gratitude and reverence to those who came before me and helped me lift the burden of my own suffering through sharing their suffering with me. The underlying hope behind every word that I write is that my words may do something similar for another.

Addition by subtraction

Like the vast majority of what I write, the tweet used in the image above was a reflection that I had about myself. At the time that I wrote it, I was suffering greatly. In part because I was still grieving the relatively recent passing of my mother. In part because I felt purposeless in my work and couldn't seem to figure out how to consistently contribute in a way that felt deeply meaningful. In part because I was entrenched in an emotionally codependent relationship with seemingly no way out. But what I realized right before penning this tweet was that, a few years prior, I had specifically asked the Universe to make me better—to help me uncover and face the wounded parts of myself that made it so easy for me to hurt others—to allow me to be a tool to be used in service to the benefit of the world at at large.

I guess what I expected when I initially made that request was for God to snap their fingers and immediately wipe away every impurity that existed within me so I that I could walk the Earth in blissful serenity as a 'chosen one' who was gifted divinity. What I got instead was a dirty mirror, some sandpaper, and the advisement that I would need to use a lot of elbow grease. What I got instead was the realization that the value in healing was in the journey, not in the destination. Getting better wasn’t about being handed perfection—it was about being given the tools to uncover it within myself.

The "dirty mirror" I was given was a reflection of my distorted view of myself at the time—flawed, wounded, unworthy, and filled with habits that perpetuated my suffering. The "sandpaper" was the current circumstances I found myself in as a cog in the corporate wheel, finding no meaning in what I spent the bulk of my days doing outside of being able to pay my bills and being in a relationship that I wasn't happy in but felt quite literally bound to due to trauma. Both of these things wore me down on a daily basis, and to be honest, at times I didn't think I would be able to go on. But with time and intentional effort, the jagged edges that my ego used to get caught on regularly started to smooth over and the things that used to bother me didn't bother me so much anymore.

I began to understand that my perception of my job and of my relationship was just that—a perception—and that I could shift that perception from being negative to being positive. The job, albeit soul-sucking, paid the most I'd ever made at the time and laid the foundation for what kind of salary I could command going forward. It also provided me with the resources to be able to get out of my relationship with relative comfort. The relationship, albeit anxiety-ridden, also had moments of great joy and great depth and taught me things about myself that I could have never learned without it. Even though it ultimately ended, it was success, not a failure, because of the amount of healing that was birthed out of it. Both of these things brought me tremendous amounts of pain at times but the pain they brought was not in vain because it unveiled to me wounds from my past that were controlling my fate because I was afraid to confront them. And through the pain of both of these circumstances, I was able to work out many of my rough edges and become much closer to the smooth version of myself I desired to be.

Had God, the Universe, or whomever had just given me the healing that I needed without any effort on my end, I would have surely taken it for granted, allowed it to get to my head, and placed myself on a pedestal—looking down on and judging those I claimed to want to help. Without struggle, there would have been no gratitude and without gratitude, much like the supposed devil himself, I would have began to convince myself that my power came from me, not through me, and that entitlement would have undoubtedly become destructive to myself and everyone around me.

Nothing grows from a place of perfection so, to ask to be better is to ask for challenges and discomfort. Many people believe they are blessed because they get the material things that they desire. I feel that I'm blessed because I've received challenges that have forced me to evolve into a version of myself that no longer depends on material things to feel whole. The sky might fall, but I'm not worried at all, and that is directly because I've learned to find power in pain; so whatever pain the future may hold for me will ultimately only further serve my purpose and I hope you understand that the same can be true for you too.

What's Going On With Me?

One of my favorite Ram Dass quotes is "If you think you're enlightened, go spend a week with your family". The upcoming week is a week where many of us will be surrounded by family which, for many of us, means being poked, prodded, and triggered. Though I know this is uncomfortable, I also feel like it's the perfect opportunity to challenge ourselves, see how far we've grown, and see what work is left to do. Personally, while I am looking forward to seeing my family during the holiday season, I'm not at all looking forward to traveling in the cold. As much as I like Pittsburgh, I don't know if I can handle these bitter winters year after year. Like, next week it's going to be in the 20s ☹️😭🥶 I'd be lying if I said I wasn't seriously considering living somewhere much warmer around this time next year but we'll see.

I hope you enjoy Thanksgiving, if you observe it, but even if you don't, I hope you'll take some time this week to reflect on all the things you're grateful for. I certainly am grateful for you and I'm looking forward to our last month of newsletters for the year starting next week. I don't quite know what next year has in store for me in terms of what I'll be offering but I do know that I feel more equipped than ever for whatever comes next.

With love,

Micheal Sinclair 💜