"Narratives about pain circulate continuously in all cultures. "No pain, no gain" is an American modern mini-narrative: it compresses the story of a protagonist who understands that the road to achievement runs only through hardship. The impact of such stories is less easily measured than beliefs about pain as the precursor of inescapable catastrophes, but their power is no less significant. The new field of narrative psychology focuses explicitly on the "storied" nature of human conduct." David Morris, "Belief and Narrative, The Scientist, March 5, 2005

Here are the lessons I learned that I share with my audiences:

1. Experiencing pain can make you a better person once you have learned by going through the pain.
2. You find yourself in a state of awareness like you’ve never known before.
3. You see how fragile your body, mind, feelings and spirit can be and, at the same time, see their durability.
4. You now adjust your way of living to accommodate the changes needed to heal and keep yourself mentally, emotionally and spiritually fit 
5. Ultimately, as with all of our pain, you have to work it out with the God of your understanding.  When you make peace with God’s children (and remember that you, too, are one of God’s children) you make peace with God as well.

Novelist William Styron in his own clinical depression faced a pain that approached the inexpressible. "For myself," he wrote, "the pain is most closely connected to drowning or suffocation--but even these images are off the mark."(Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness) A certain semantic slippage is native to pain, as Virginia Woolf wrote: "Let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor, and language at once runs dry." (On Being Ill) Grids of verbal descriptors have now been validated across cultures in an effort to map language onto pain, but disputes over meaning have marked its history ever since Aristotle classified pain as an emotion. (See

It Hurts: How We Biologically Experience Physical and Emotional Pain

Joseph Santini

"A day of healing begins when you decide you are worthy. You see just how priceless you are. You feel that you are something to the world and the people around you. Grab hold to the chain that you have allowed to bind you to nothing and live because you are something. You smile because you can. You stand because you choose to see what is in store. Today is a day of healing."

And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain.

And he said:

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;

And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.

And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

Much of your pain is self-chosen.

It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.

Therefore, trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility:

For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,

And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.