Pain as a Catalyst

Navigating the Depths of Artistic Journey

As an artist, there are two types of pain.

A pain that draws you to the arts and a career pain as you try to emerge from underground.

To thrive on your journey and reach your full potential, embracing and reconciling with pain is essential, irrespective of your chosen path.

Pain has its own nature.

In a polarised world perhaps the last unarguable is the sentience which connects us.

That universality forms a neural network, not limited to humans alone, but encompassing all living beings.

When you feel most alone and cut off, it’s helpful to remember that the pain itself is an artery to all life

In that, our pain is not something that is ours alone.

Instead, it binds us to all things.

Though the pain hurts, it is your opportunity.

The world needs its artists because they are the ones who dare not to blot out their suffering.

We need those who confront the destructive powers within us to safeguard us from the threats which endanger us.

That is the role of art; to bring back discoveries made at the threshold of the human spirit.

As such it’s the willingness of artists to look the abyss right in the eye which draws us to them.

So though your pain lacerates, stings and torments you, understand it as a gateway.

The world places a question into each human life. And it is our task to answer it.

In my experience, the greatest pain is experienced when a person resists this call.
Even if one understands why one ignores it!

There is no answering that question without walking through the fires which surround it.

Yes, that which we most want guards itself.

It doesn’t suffer fools and gates itself from imposters. And so we have to make ourselves worthy of the challenge.

You are fortified in adversity through understanding the “why” behind that which you seek.

What is that “why”?

It is the promise of transformation.

To become what it is you could be. An ancient promise in you.

That’s what is gnawing at you:
Your potential.

You are willing to suffer the pain of transformation because of the promise written into it.

The act of transformation is when your knowledge of the world is deepened, heightened, and radicalized.

You suffer the pain of transformation to link with this knowledge.

You are fused with it, and in the embodiment process become something other than that which you were.

So the meaning of pain is contained in the promise of what it can be changed into.

Is there something more fertile? All our lives are a transformation story.

What differs is simply how we read the script. I find it helpful when I’m hurting to ask myself this simple question:

Do I have the courage today to move from one state to another?
Nothing vanquishes resistance quicker!

You are the cocoon which precedes the butterfly, the carbon which heralds the diamond, and the gas & dust which form a planet.

So if you’re struggling today, and the hurt feels at the threshold of being too much, remember two things:

First, there is meaning in your pain.

And secondly, the pain is transforming you from one state to another.

That is why it hurts.
Suffer that journey.
Capture the shapes, sounds, colours and words it casts around you.

The world will listen.
And it will reward you too.
But never in the way you expect.

Here’a little surprise!