Blessings in Disguise

14 Apr Blessings in Disguise

Here is one of my favourite quotes;

“See pain as a blessing in disguise. Every worry is a test. Every obstacle aids your evolution. Every failure is a stepping stone to success. Fear not, don’t look back. Be bold.” – Swami Sivananda

In order to analyse the quote lets break it down into its component sentences.

“See pain as a blessing in disguise.”

As many of us want to live a pain free life, we fail to appreciate just how important pain is. Pain tells us when there is something wrong, it is an important signal that warns us so react quickly to something harmful or damaging. A particularly harrowing example of this is given in Sam Harris’s book “Waking Up”. He describes how he was woken in the night by a rat biting at his toes. The pain woke him up so he could chase the rat away. He describes how people suffering from leprosy are not so fortunate. They often lose feeling in their limbs and cannot feel pain there. When a rat starts eating their fingers or toes there is no pain signal to wake them up so they can protect themselves. It is a common way for them to lose fingers and toes.

“Every worry is a test. Every obstacle aids your evolution.”

In a similar way we wish for an easy life and fail to appreciate the value of challenges. We associate happiness with relaxation and being carefree. When the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi tested people to see when they were happy he found people reported being happy at work more often than in their leisure time. They were happiest when faced with a challenge that forced them to concentrate and focus. This concentration and focus was the precursor to entering a state of consciousness he labeled “flow” in which people would perform to their highest level of ability while experiencing a blissful state of being fully absorbed in the activity they were doing.

Challenges and resistance allow us to grow. We go to the gym and lift heavier and heavier weights. The weights provide the resistance that our muscles need to strengthen them. Difficult people act as “weights” that we can use to build our compassion “muscles”. Difficult circumstances can help grow our equanimity muscles. Every obstacle is an opportunity for us to grow either physically, psychologically or spiritually.

There is a famous story of Tibetans trying to convince an Indian Buddhist monk to come and stay in Tibet. They tell the monk that “everyone is Tibet is so incredibly friendly!”. The monk answers in a distressed tone “If everyone there is so friendly how will I work on my compassion!”.

“Every failure is a stepping stone to success.”

An ex-soldier called Mick Coup once told me that the quality the army prized amongst all others was tenaciousness. It brings to mind to Churchill quote “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm” and also the maxim popularized by the NLP crowd ” There is no failure, only feedback”. If we recognise that there is no such thing as failure, only useful results, than ‘failures’ provide the feedback that we need to make corrections on our way towards our desired outcome. We often negatively label that which falls short of success as ?failure? when we should view it positively as important feedback or information to enable us to seek the revision or improvement which will ultimately lead to our success. Another way that failure can lead to success can be found in any history of science book. Not infrequently have scientists set out to discover something and failed but then realized they have discovered something of far more importance. Many of the great discoveries in science arose from errors, failures and mistakes.

“Fear not, don?t look back. Be bold.”

This sentence neatly ties all the others together. Fear is the reason we fail to appreciate the importance of pain. It is the reason we fail to see the opportunities for growth present in challenges. It is also the reason why we fail to see the role failure plays in success. Fear keeps our minds stuck in the past reliving all our mistakes while our ego spins a “woe is me” victim narrative out of these scattered memories. It clouds our minds from seeing how much we have grown and from facing the future in a bold and confident way. A bold attitude would enable us to value pain, challenges, setbacks, obstacles and errors and see in each of them the opportunity to grow into greater person than we are today.