The Culturally Conditioned Mindset You Need to Release for Personal Sovereignty

How to re-claim pain as a crucible for transformation.

Through mainstream media, advertisements, and everyday conversation, we’re conditioned to see pain, suffering, and death as problems to “manage” or avoid at all costs.

The basic imbalance is this: as a culture, we don’t have a shared context to frame our pain. Since early childhood, most people get the message that it’s simply an annoyance better suppressed by over-the-counter anti-inflammatory drugs, denial, or through an emphasis on security over adventure.

By contrast, many cultures throughout history and the world help young people make the passage out of childhood and into adulthood with initiation rituals (structured encounters with pain).

From foreskin chewing to tooth removal, these initiation rituals give young people the experiential knowledge that pain inevitably transforms into something different when they surrender to it.

For most of us, the problem is that without a way to contextualize the pain inevitable in life, it’s easy to live with a low-grade yet constant sense that something isn’t right.

We see the results of this worldview, living as we do in a culture full of anxious, unfulfilled people.

For psychological freedom, question this false god

“It’s as if we’ve locked our childself in a bedroom, bolted the door, and turned up the music so loud that we don’t have to hear her wailing and banging. Then we arrange the furniture just right, dust the house, and wonder why it just doesn’t seem to feel like home.” — Own Yourself, Kelly Brogan

Without a first-person, culturally supported encounter with pain, the default alternative is to craft a life based around meeting your needs in covert, shadowy ways.

In our societal narratives, we see this dynamic in the widespread belief in an external protector.

Whether it’s direct-to-consumer advertising or the framing of political issues, our worldviews tend to be shaped by a narrative that follows a predictable template: a depiction of a powerless victim who demands rescue by something outside herself: a bill that MUST be passed, a medication, a board-certified specialist, whatever.

The story of the external protector also runs rampant in the cultural depiction of the 9-to-5 job as the pinnacle of security. In this case, the vaunted protector manifests as a boss and their sacred, security-bearing gifts like paid vacations or insurance.

And nowhere is the external protector narrative more obvious than in the pharmaceutical medical model. In conversation and in practice, people are conditioned to think of their bodies (however subtly) as in need of repair by a doctor-mechanic.

“Doctors are the agents of our society’s expectations that technology is superior to the body and that bodies are intrinsically bound to fail.

The paradigm sees birth as nothing more than an accident waiting to happen, an opportunity for your pelvic floor to be bent out of shape. — The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

Whether it’s medicalizing childbirth, grief, or other ancient human expressions, this worldview reduces our experiences to accidents waiting to happen, our bodies to meat suits, and our minds to impersonal neurophysiological events.

The external protector mythos, in its various costumes, reflects child-like dynamics most people spend their entire lives within.

And I don’t simply mean that people are emotionally immature — instead, our culture normalizes archetypal, parent-child dynamics between individuals and systems like medicine, education, and government.

We function as if the approval of this external protector were a consolation prize for the loss of contact with our authenticity.

Propaganda conditions people to swirl within a fear-based state longing for mommy medicine or daddy government to swoop in and save them from corruption, their broken bodies, or whatever horrible “-ism” they’d like to cite.

Because we don’t have a shared narrative to frame pain or death, our suffering gets reduced to something to simply suppress or fight, not a crucible for transformation.

The mindset shift that unlocks the gates of personal sovereignty

“The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.” Carl Jung

So much of the dysfunction in our society can be reduced to the compulsive, culturally reinforced need to obscure distressing experiences rather than surrender to them.

We see this in the barrage of stimulation in restaurants, bars, airports, and other public spaces: blaring pop music, seven TVs at max volume playing different seven channels.

Distraction from the inner landscape is a priority in our culture because we’re not supported in — or even invited into the possibility of — surrendering to it.

There are two ways to view pain: one is enlivening, while the other reaffirms fear. As described, the standard Western way is to see it as something we might as well suppress as long as we have the technology to do it.

But pain is essentially a feedback mechanism: it lets you know what behaviors threaten your survival. When all you do is “manage” your pain through medications, compulsive scrolling, or another habit, you ignore the guidance the pain is attempting to offer.

You then become de-sensitized to the feedback intended to guide your behavior. This is how people become chronically ill: they suppress the initial signals of imbalance. And as long as they keep artificially managing the pain, the consequences may not manifest for decades.

The alternative perspective is that pain is an agent of transformation. When you look for ways to surrender to pain, it expands your resilience. It gives you the experiential lesson that you are bigger than your pain.

From this space, you dramatically increase your tolerance for all sorts of sensations, taking you miles beyond the limited opportunities of the fear-driven masses.

When I sit with pain, I know that it is transforming me inside. It is refining and re-configuring and upgrading all that needs that.

What emerges will be closer to truth, more resilient, and more real, even if I don’t like it at first.

The pain doesn’t need to be understood or narrated. It just needs to do its work with my consciousness, allowing it by holding space for it in order to honor it. — Own Yourself, Kelly Brogan

Entering a conscious relationship with pain makes you a much less tense person. It plugs you into a type of trust you can’t intellectualize; you can only tap into.

This awareness not only makes you less susceptible to media-driven fear mongering, but it also heightens your resourcefulness and creativity.

All you need to do to make this shift is to feel the sensations that arise for you without needing them to be different.

Experiment with the notion that sensation is inherently neutral: suffering is what happens when we dwell on how the sensations mean we (or our lives) are uniquely wrong and bad.

Some additional, equally adventurous ways you can consciously confront and transform your pain include..

• Skydiving
• Psychedelic experiences
• Medication-free childbirth (the endogenous psychedelic)
• Cold plunging
• Technology fasting

Expanding your appetite for scary sensations will help you move through tedium, fear of rejection, and other emotions that prevent most people from pursuing their aspirations with the ferocity necessary to make them a reality.

It moves you beyond the anxious, passive-aggressive dull hum that characterizes life when you’re trapped in the game of “managing” your experience so it conforms to how you think it should be, instead of uniting with what is.

As writer Byron Katie has asked somewhere out there on the world wide web,

“How do you know that something should be happening? Because it is.”

Do you accept the story of “normal” as it’s been presented to you? For more on the threads of wrongness throughout our cultural pendulums…

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