Pain and Pleasure: How to Get Pleasure from Emotional and Physical Pain
Pain and pleasure are missing from conversations in the spirituality/personal development world around "emotional alchemy." Most people will tell you to learn lessons from bad things that happen to you, or to look for the good thing that comes after the pain is over, thus alchemizing the pain into something worthwhile.
But I never found this to be satisfying enough. If our whole lives are spent sludging through hardship just to get to something good at the end, it means we spend much more time feeling bad than good. I don't want my life to be a sludge. I don't want to force myself to be miserable, just so I can get to something good at the end. I want to enjoy my life NOW.
Especially because, when we finally reach our desires, they often don't live up to our expectations anyway. There's a lot of disappointment in reaching goals because life happens and experiences and people are flawed. It's easy to end up thinking, "I just worked so hard and put myself through so much…for what??"
Physical pain fits into this category too. When we're cycling up a monstrous hill and the legs are burning, when we're gasping for breath halfway through a long run, or forcing ourselves to endure another 60 seconds of a wall plank, we think, "Why am I putting myself through this just for a nice body?" Or "Just for a nice view at the top?"
Most people decide the pain isn't worth it and they give up.
They decide not to train for that marathon, not to go for the business growth, not to work with the coach to get a better life, or just to grab the pain killer or anti-depressant with the nasty side effects.
OR, if you have strong resilience skills, you persist through the pain, but always feel like 90% of your day is forcing yourself to do things you don't want to do. Enduring hardship. When you'd like life to be about joy, pleasure, doing what you love, and being free – physically and emotionally.
So for quite some time now, I've been playing with different techniques to deal with emotional and physical pain – to help me and my clients actually be able to enjoy inevitable pain. Because this allows us to accomplish any goal. It keeps us IN THE PRESENT MOMENT.
So we can actually enjoy the process of going towards the goal while we're at it.
The Pain and Pleasure Connection: How Pleasure from Pain is Possible
As a Clinical Hypnotist, I was trained in hypnosis for pain management: helping people reduce and even remove pain symptoms. Which I often do. When you have work to do, it's nice to be able to get rid of period cramps, headaches or chronic pain, so you can focus on what you need to do.
But there are some cases that need something more than these pain management techniques.
For example, big injuries. I got severe tendinitis for one month while I was bikepacking in Montenegro, then two months later as I was cycling through Albania, I broke that same foot.
So I took a more metaphysical approach to my trances, to find insights into messages that my subconscious mind was trying to get me to face. To see where my blind spot might be, what course of action I might need to redirect. Essentially, to shine a light on something I couldn't see with my conscious mind.
PAIN IS PSYCHEDELIC.
Donna del Lago or Le Bout du monde II, by Leonor Fini
I'll show you what this looked like and take you through a trance of your own in my workshop: Pain Into Pleasure.
There are other types of pain, other than injuries or chronic pain.
What about the pain of muscles burning during an intense workout?
What about the pain of heartbreak, grief, or extreme disappointment?
When we really explore how we express pain during these times, we are actually doing a lot of the same things we do during intense pleasure. Pain contorts our facial expressions the same way they contort during an orgasm.
PAIN IS EROTIC.
We cry when we're extremely sad, and we cry when we're extremely happy. We really weep and thrash around when we're in emotional pain, and we can do the same when jumping for joy, or again, during sex. (If you don't ever wildly express yourself during any of these, then you probably need to come to my workshop to bring you back to life.)
And at some point, when we have pain so intense it feels like we can't bear it anymore, we have to do something with it. Scribble out a desperate poem. Recklessly splash paint on something. Scream out an anguished song.
PAIN IS ART.
Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet,
"Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain."
So if our way of expressing pain is so similar to how we express joy, then perhaps we can only feel as much joy as we are able to feel pain. And maybe, if the two represent opposite sides of the same spectrum of sensation, they don't have to be opposites at all. Maybe we can take the expressions and sensations of joy and transfer them over to where we're experiencing pain, and experience them together. Creating an entirely new sensation out of the combination.
I wrote this little poem:
Then, the question everyone asks:
How??
Pain is Psychedelic
Here's how I play with pain as a substance to take me into trance.
(Who needs drugs when you have pain?)
One day, I was walking a long, rural road to visit my friend who lived outside of town, and I got very hungry. It was the kind of hunger that makes you instantly weak and you feel that you must eat, now, or you'll collapse.
But there was nothing to eat for another 45 minutes. So I used the feeling of intense hunger to take myself into a trip. It started to make the leaves on the trees look different. The ground beneath me started to move in slippery, strange ways. The colors around me turned neon-flourescent.
I watched it and experienced it all curiously and with enjoyment, because I love when I can see things in different ways. But soon, I swam through all the trippiness, and it opened up into creative ideas. I quickly opened my voice note app and composed several little inspired messages that felt like genius gems of insight.
Before I knew it, I was at my friend's house, eating the meal she'd prepared and feeling proud of what I'd created on the way.
I did the same with my broken leg. I had to ride the bus several hours back to another city with a freshly broken tibia and zero pain meds. When I tuned into the pain, I found myself entering a big pink room where there was no gravity and I swirled and danced around. I found this place to be full of freedom and fun. I stayed there dancing and marveling at the images that came along for the long hours until the bus finally dropped me off near the hospital.
This distracted me from the pain while I was in emergency mode, then I was able to reactivate the trance later, to find tangible answers to some deep personal questions I've been searching for the answers to, for quite some time.
Artist unknown
Pain Is Erotic
This summer, I played with ways to experience pain differently for physical workouts. Since I was bikepacking through Montenegro and Albania, I wanted to not hate every minute of the steep hill climbs.
So as I felt the burn, and continued to feel the burn – the point where you think your muscles will surely give out any moment and you're dying to jump off and walk the bike because you can't endure it anymore, I zoomed into this exquisite pain and explored every aspect of what I was feeling.
I noticed my breathing. Wow, it sounds a lot like sex: even and rhythmic, getting faster the more pain I got into.
I was so zero-ed in on the intensity of the pain, that the rest of the world ceased to exist. I had NO other thoughts; my mind wasn't wandering, I wasn't overthinking about anything in life. I was only focused on the pain. Wow, it sounds a lot like great sex.
I noticed how I started to speed up and push harder as I got closer to the top, as I began to anticipate the rush of the moment I finally reached the top. Sounds a lot like sex, when pushing for a climax.
I observed that the pain moved in waves as I went up and down the hills. Extreme pain that finally reaches a climax, then the relief of coasting or soaring downhill, before going in for more on the next one.
These observations alone made it interesting enough for me to chuckle to myself through the ride. But then I took them up a notch: by moving from observer of the similarities to fully diving into them and feeling them, as if I were actually in the act of it while cycling along.
I'll show you how to get this kind of pleasure from pain during my workshop: Pain Into Pleasure.
Artist unknown
The Kink of Pain
For so many people, sex is the only place they feel they can express themselves. It's why they will pay any kind of money to try to quench those needs. It's why they'll accept horrible treatment or toxic dynamics just because the sex is good.
Some people love painful kinks in bed, often because they're numbing some other emotional pain in their lives (key word here being "often"). People who can't speak up for themselves in real life can be the biggest screamers in bed. Those unable to receive love and kindness in life might be major pillow princesses at night.
Any time we can experience and express suppressed emotions or sensations it feels healing and freeing. And it's a beautiful thing. But it's never good to be too dependent on one person or one outlet in life. Doctors recommend balance, right? Especially if you're looking to break out of certain patterns or dynamics that leave you dissatisfied and seeking something different.
It's totally possible to take what's pleasurable about sex and transfer it to other areas of life. To feel the same urges, desires and passions in other important areas you're looking to grow in. Pain is an easy transition medium because the expressions and sensations are so similar. Pain can be your new erotic kink. Not necessarily in bed, but in whatever pains you are already experiencing right now.
And once you get used to enjoying emotional and physical pain, you can transfer the same eroticism to creating art.
Sweet Gwendoline, by John Willie
Pain Is Art
As a hypnotist, I get people to juice up whatever resource they can access from one area of life, then while it's activated, quickly bring the other area of life to the front of their mind. This rewires the brain to change the client's automatic response to the original situation. So if you typically crave a cigarette every time you drink a beer, we'd juice you up with something that disgusts you, then place it in front of the urge for a cigarette, so that every time you think about a cigarette from then on, it's disgusting instead of enticing.
Well, we can do this with pain too, to rewire the brain to experience pain as pleasure.
Some people would say this is unpleasant, because if there's a breakup or a physical ailment or major life disappointment, we're conditioned to numb those things, not to actively try to feel them. Much less ENJOY them.
But artists get this. We all have our favorite breakup songs that allow us to pour our souls into singing along and give us a safe space to feel feelings we couldn't feel on our own. This is how to deal with emotional pain.
A couple years after I ran away from my traumatic home life, I rediscovered my love for poetry and spent my evenings after work drinking red wine and writing poems that processed my family trauma. Then I read them out loud at open mics.
It was a way for me to feel things that were already bubbling up to the surface, and to be seen and witnessed in these feelings, while at the same time being admired for my creative ways of describing them.
Again, very healing and freeing. AND it's productive.
Personally, the thing that annoys me the most about trauma is the inconvenience, expense and time it has cost me to deal with it, when I could've been doing other interesting things with my life. It's fucking expensive to grow up poor and abused.
So that's why channeling pain into fucked-up relationships and sex that feels good in the moment but then turns into shameful regret afterward isn't my favorite venue for the pain.
I'd rather put it towards something more productive.
When I can use my pain to create something tangible that I can hold up and say, "Yes. I made this!" it's a win.
If I can share it with other people and have them say, "Wow, you expressed something I've been feeling but couldn't put into words," I feel success.
And of course, if I can get paid to make money from the thing I created, it gives me another hit of feeling productive and useful.
(Yes, I know, sitting around and feeling and being present should be productive enough, but knowing that in an ideological sense isn't on the same level as paying my bills with my art.)
Image from countrythangdaily.com. Dolly Parton wrote this iconic song about getting bullied at school, for being poor.
Turn the Theory of Pain and Pleasure Into Something You Can FEEL
Hearing these things in theory is always interesting, but the real results come when you do it for yourself. So I'm hosting a live, online Group Hypnosis/Workshop to do all these things with you. I'll hypnotize you to turn any pain into pleasure.
You'll experience, for yourself, how to open your mind and change the way you experience pain. Pain as psychedelic. Pain as erotic. And you'll leave ready to channel your pain into art.
Pain is such an inevitable part of life. Especially a life that you are living to the fullest: trying new things, getting out of your comfort zone, being courageous – these will all come with pain alongside.
So stop suffering from pain, and enjoy it instead.
Here's the link to sign up for Pain Into Pleasure.
About Me
I'm Mia Kercher, and I'm a Hypnotist & Coach of the Unconscious Mind
I got into the world of personal development several years ago when I hit rock bottom in my life. My relationship was a disaster, and it felt like I'd tried everything you could possibly try to have a great life (travel, adventure, romance, education, art...everything) but I STILL wasn't happy.
Regular therapy for 2 years helped me, but I'd hit a wall. Things weren't really progressing, and I still didn't have a grasp on my purpose or really finding joy out of life.
Then I discovered coaching, hypnosis, and magic. These gave me tools to ACTUALLY change the things I didn't like in my life. They gave me connection to Life, to something bigger than me, and got me passionate again.
I'd love to help you find this too.
