Stop “Fighting” Your Pain: Learn the Art of Mental Alchemy

How to transmute pain into joy and power

“Expression is healing, and suppression is an engine of suffering.” Amandha Vollmer

Mainstream society will tell you to “fight” your pain. They’ll feed you over-the-counter anti-inflammatory drugs, alcohol-based hand sanitizer, and other toxic substances with the prefix “anti-.”

But these are all just ways to fight an inner war. Any time you feel called to “fight” anything — whether it’s yourself, the government, or your own body — you’re trapped in the drama triangle.

The drama triangle refers to the three ways you can be disempowered: either as a victim, a persecutor, or a rescuer. Regardless of where you land on the triangle, if you’re operating within it, you’re drained of energy and powerless to change your circumstances.

The better alternative is to transmute your pain. The notion of transmutation comes from the art and science of alchemy: the process of turning metals into gold. But alchemy is also a spiritual and psychological process through which you can transform your suffering into power, joy, and possibility.

When you suppress or fight your suffering, it typically only buys time until the pain re-emerges in another form. But when you transmute your pain, you embrace it, and in that embrace, it transforms you into someone different.

Tonglen: Sending & Taking Suffering

Tonglen is an ancient Tibetan Buddhist practice that helps you cultivate compassion for your suffering and the suffering of others. The practice invites you to use your pain as a vehicle for connecting with everyone else currently suffering in the same way

This is something you can do as a meditation, but it can also be a gesture you make whenever you experience a painful sensation or emotion.

As you inhale, you imagine breathing in a thick, black smoke: this represents the suffering of yourself and everyone contending with similar emotions. Through this gesture, you experiment with taking on the suffering of all beings.

On the exhale, you imagine breathing out a golden light, representing your personal power and equanimity, which you imagine spreading to all beings currently suffering.

This can sound like a demanding practice, but Tonglen changes you through the recognition that you’re never alone in your pain: for any difficult circumstance, there are hundreds of thousands of people feeling the same way.

Rather than imagining yourself an isolated entity alone in your suffering, you find solace in the felt connection with everyone enduring the same things.

The practice can also grow your resilience. In the Western world, we’re conditioned to believe there is no redemption arc on the other side of pain — if we can, we might as well numb it with drugs, Netflix, shopping, and other agents of suppression.

But when you face your pain directly, you allow it to function like a psycho-spiritual upgrade — you get the experiential recognition that you are bigger than your pain: you’re a being capable of holding high sensation, and when you do, it inevitably transforms.

This not only allows you to transmute your suffering into resilience in the present moment, but it brings you solace: you know you can stay present in the face of future pain, lifting a massive weight off you.

Finding the Advantage in Struggle

Reality creation teacher Quazi Johir describes this principle as the advantage method. The goal is to connect with the benefit in every situation you face, no matter how daunting it seems to your ego.

In some instances, this will be easy to do, and other times it won’t be. In these cases, it’s an invitation to grow your capacity to sit with uncertainty without numbing it or assuming the worst.

The advantage method isn’t a form of self-deception. It’s a way of humbling yourself to how little you can know from the perspective of your ego.

“Don’t worry. You don’t know enough to worry. Who do you think you are that you should worry, for crying out loud? It’s a total waste of time. It presupposes such a knowledge of the situation that it is in fact a form of hubris.” Terence McKenna

It’s also worth considering that the way we frame our experience influences how it unfolds.

This is easy to see logically and intuitively. When you assign a negative meaning to an event, it begets more negativity. The negative framing feeds into the way you act and how you conceive of yourself, creating ripple effects that perpetuate negativity.

Yet when you’re able to find the redeeming features of a situation, more and more redemption reveals itself. This is the same principle at play when you buy a pair of red socks and begin seeing them everywhere.

Your reticular activating system (RAS) — a part of the brain that filters and seeks information to confirm your pre-existing beliefs — becomes primed toward specific stimuli. Through this principle, “what you focus on expands,” as wisely said by Wayne Dyer.

Enjoying the Aesthetics of Your Pain

In the book Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power, Carolyn Elliott recommends taking an aesthetic, rather than a moralistic approach to your pain.

In other words, instead of looking for the reasons your suffering means your life sucks and you really are a loser, you practice looking at it as if it were a work of art. Carolyn writes:

“As an experiment, the next time you feel funky, rather than judging how you feel, just savor it as if it were a virtual reality experience crafted for you by the world’s foremost artist.”

This is another way of accessing the essential benefit of meditation. When we meditate, we experience the nuances of our sensations and emotions without identifying with them, that is, making them mean something about us.

When you practice seeing the aesthetic value of your emotions, you stop being their victim. You witness them as if they were external to you.

This keeps you in touch with the majesty of reality. The fact you even have a mind complex enough to concoct narratives about the meaning of your suffering is a marvel in itself.

And of course, it’s only natural to identify with our emotions — we’ve done it since childhood, and it’s a constantly reinforced habit.

But embracing the aesthetic value of your emotions can be a practice: it’s a gesture you pull like a lever when you need more objective distance from strong emotions like self-pity, fear, and aversion.

For more strange tools for transforming turmoil into power…