Pain is important, and changing who you are is difficult, painful, and scary. Most of the self-help industry sees change as this euphoric, liberating thing and tells you that you can be happy all the time. I think the opposite.
Growth is a painful process. If we’re ever going to collectively begin to grapple with the problems that we have collectively, we’re going to have to move back the veil and deal with each other on a more human level.
Nobody wants to do it - not real change, not soul change, not the painful molecular change required to truly become who you need to be. Nobody ever does real transformation for fun. Nobody ever does it on a dare. You do it only when your back is so far against the wall that you have no choice anymore.
Change is a funny thing. We never are quite sure what we are becoming or even why. Then one day we look at ourselves and wonder who we are and how we got that way. Only one thing about change remains constant...it is always painful
I know change can be painful. But from change comes growth.
Much of human history can, I think, be described as a gradual and sometimes painful liberation from provincialism, the emerging awareness that there is more to the world than was generally believed by our ancestors.
All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.
Habits are soon assumed; but when we strive to strip them off, 'tis being flayed alive.
One of the things we know now that we didn't know then, is that revolutions are very painful to a lot of people. And that at the stage that we have evolved to now, a revolution would be extremely painful.
From my experience and observing a lot of other people that often times that only happens - a transformational experience or shedding of the skin - happens when we are at the end of our road and there is pain involved. We have to change or we continue to live in that almost intolerable pain.
Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.
