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The Unwelcome Gift of Pain
This post is my first on a series of gifts that we generally don’t want, and I am starting with pain. I don’t suggest that all pain is a gift. In fact, too much pain, whether physical, emotional, or mental, can harm or even kill you. But life without pain would prove dangerous indeed. Pain acts as a warning, an instructor, and even as a chastening, and most humans need all three. Pain as a Warning: If our bodies felt no pain whatsoever, we would be at severe risk. That is how leprosy endangers its victims. Because their nerves are deadened, they cannot feel injuries and infections. In the end,…
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How to Find Your Why
All successful salespeople recognize the importance of the why. After all, one must have a powerful why in order to make cold calls that result in rejection far more often than not. I often ask my students why they are in college. And a few have an answer. Most just shrug their shoulders and when pressed, admit that they are there because either they have nothing else to do with their lives or because their parents made them. Sometimes students enroll in college, enter into debt, and then flunk out, simply because their why was weak or worse, nonexistent. Finding the words that explain the meaning for your life can…
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How to Make Meaning out of Suffering
Suffering without meaning is the hardest kind of agony to bear. Humans will put themselves through all sorts of torture, endure any kind of hell if only some meaning is attached to it. Parents whose children are killed by random gunmen or drunk drivers begin awareness campaigns. The thought that their children’s brief lives and sudden deaths held no meaning is the cross that is too hard to bear. Others of us begin to tell our stories, justifying the horrors faced by the hopeful thought that perhaps we can prevent even just one from going down the dead end we did. Or we frame our errors with inspirational quotes about…
Healing Through Art & Words
