When something hurts, do you allow the pain or do you make it go away? We've built so much of our lives around comfort, but pursuing our vision, our dreams, means taking risks, experiencing disappointment, and feeling pain.Pain is not avoidable. It is something we are all gonna go through. So today, we're exploring how to navigate that pain, what happens when we contract around it, and how to open ourselves to feel it with compassion
Because a meaningful life asks us to stay open even when it hurts. I'm Carolina Zuleta, and this is the Visionary's Pursuit podcast.
Hi, everyone. Welcome back. So in the last several weeks, I've been having a lot of meetings with my clients in which they are experiencing pain. For some of them, the pain is coming because they're being challenged in their relationships, or maybe they're making very tough decisions that hurt them.
For others, it's because they worked on a business deal or on a goal for years, and they've been turned down or things haven't worked out. And for others, it's because they've climbed the mountain, they've built the business, they've achieved their goals, and all of a sudden it feels like they're at the bottom again, and there's a whole new mountain they need to climb, and that feels painful.
And for me, 2026 hasn't been what I expected, and that has been painful. All year I've had big goals, and many of the things that I expected that I was gonna be able to accomplish, or the goals that I was gonna meet, I haven't been able to do that yet.
And although I'm not giving up, there have been moments this year that I've wanted to give up and that I've really been hurting inside because of the disappointment. Because sometimes when we put a lot of energy into something and it doesn't work out, it feels like our energy is drained I can relate to the pain, to the pain my clients are going through.
In fact, I wanted to share a story. A few months ago, here at our house, we have a hot tub, and it was one of those beautiful afternoons. The girls had, come back from school, and my husband, the two little ones, and I were in this hot tub outside. We had music playing. The girls had squirt guns, and they were, getting each other wet, and everyone was laughing. And I was trying to be there and be present, but I couldn't feel happy. And I started feeling even worse because I started telling myself, "Why am I not happy? I should be happy. Look around. You have everything you've ever wanted."
I'm living in a house that is beyond the house of my dreams. I have the most incredible husband, two healthy, beautiful girls, this afternoon freedom, time. Why can't I feel happy? And then I started telling myself, "I'm a coach, and I have all the tools, and what's wrong with me? Why can't I feel happy?" And then I even got into a darker place.
What if I have lost my ability to feel happiness? And then I started to get really scared that something actually was really wrong with me. a couple of days after that, I was talking with my friend Caroline, and I was telling her this experience, and what she reminded me of was that I was judging my pain.
And that when we judge our pain, when we tell ourselves stories as I shouldn't feel this, I should be over it, why am I experiencing this sadness, we create unnecessary suffering. And then I was reading a book to my kids that's called Grumpy Monkey, and Grumpy Monkey is about a little monkey who wakes up feeling very grumpy.
And he starts walking through the jungle, and all these animals are telling him to feel better because it's a beautiful day to climb on the trees, and it's a beautiful day to dance, and it's a beautiful day to do all these things. But he kept feeling worse.
So at some point he just runs away and runs into another character, and this character says, "Well, maybe it's a wonderful day to be grumpy." And the monkey says that he started to feel better. And I think that's what happens when we acknowledge our pain, when we decide that even if I'm in a hot tub in a beautiful day outside, it is a beautiful day to not feel happy, to feel sad, to feel disappointed, to feel grumpy.
Because judging our pain creates suffering that we don't actually need.
So that is the first tool or idea I wanna share with all of you today. That is, when you're going through pain, remember to allow your pain, because resisting it creates more of it, and it creates an unnecessary suffering
one of my teachers many years ago wrote a poem that's called The Four Loving Truths. And there's a little part about pain that I wanna read to all of you that says the following
Riding on the wave of your pain are the gifts of love and peace. As you open your heart to feel your pain, you open yourself to receive love and peace. Peace follows pain like the sun follows a storm. The charge builds, it is released, and all is calm. And the funny thing is, I talk about pain often with my clients.
I would talk about the uncomfortable emotions. And yet, when I was in the middle of it, with the knowledge and all that, I forgot. And I wanted to share that it's human also to resist the pain, to try to avoid it, to not want to experience it. I want to record this episode so you have it here anytime you have pain to come back and listen to it, and actually I'm recording it for myself as well so I can come back here and remember.
Back to the poem, one of the things I teach my clients is that pain can be experienced in three different ways. The first way is that we numb it. We do all the things to not experience it. We eat, we drink, we smoke, we overwork, we watch TV, we binge shows, we scroll on social media. We go to these activities to try to escape the pain. But the truth is it doesn't work because the pain is still there, and until we address it, it will just continue to grow inside of us. The other way is what was happening to me in the jacuzzi. We get kidnapped by the pain. We start telling ourselves more and more painful stories, and the pain starts growing and becoming bigger and bigger and unbearable.
That's not helpful either. I want you to think about maybe a moment that you were angry at someone and you start thinking about all the reasons you've been angry at this person. You just end up feeling even worse And more angry.
That doesn't help us. And the third way is to allow pain. So I always tell them that pain is like a wave in the ocean, right? You see it come, and it feels so big. And if you try to resist it, to swim on top of it, to run away from it, it comes and it knocks you off. But if you dive into it, if you go underneath the wave, it passes over you.
It feels big. It feels uncomfortable. But on the other side, as this poem reminds us, there's always peace and love and joy. So what does it mean to allow pain? How do we do this? We need to recognize when we're feeling it. We need to notice it and name it and say, "I'm sad, I'm hurting, I'm disappointed, I'm frustrated, I'm devastated." And the second thing is to notice that the pain lives in our bodies. Our minds go to the past and to the future and tell stories about the pain, but the pain really is in our body.
So one of the exercises I do with my clients is to notice the pain in their body and to stay with the physical sensations and to allow those sensations be in our bodies. I like to tell myself, "Pain, you're welcome here," and I imagining my chest opening up and allowing the pain to come. And it helps to move our bodies, to dance, to go to a kickboxing class, to go for a run.
Recently, one of my clients who was experiencing pain decided to go to Ikea, and we were laughing after the fact that it was Ikea. And what he told me was , "Look, as I was walking in Ikea and I could experience the pain, for little moments I would get distracted with one thing or the other.
But just allowing myself to walk there and be there and not try to get rid of the pain actually got me to that other side where peace and love exist
As I've shared before in this podcast, emotions are energy in motion. Anything that feels uncomfortable in our body is simply energy that is creating some sensations that we don't like. But when we allow it, when we move our bodies, when we're conscious of it, when we're knowing that we're getting under the wave and allowing the pain to come, and that we trust that on the other side is peace and love and joy, and we keep going through the pain, we will eventually arrive.
But here's the other important thing. Usually, pain doesn't come just like one wave. There are so many waves. And throughout our lives, we're gonna experience pain, so it's not about doing this once and doing it perfectly and being done with it. It's about having it as a tool, like a toothbrush that we use multiple times a day to keep our teeth clean.
Like, knowing how to allow pain, move our bodies through pain is self-care. It's a way of caring for our emotions so we can navigate them. One of the things I've noticed is that our world today is so focused on comfort. How can we get a more comfortable bed? We can control the temperature in our houses, in our cars.
I look at my bed, I have an electric blanket even before getting to my bed, it's already warm, and I love it. There's food that is easy to make that we don't have to go hunt or gather. Really, we have built lives that are so comfortable, especially for us living in the Western world, and probably many of you listening to this podcast. And it's almost like we've made comfort this goal that we should achieve. We should be comfortable. We should be happy all the time. But that's not what life is. Life is a, an experience of contrast. We cannot understand our joy without understanding our sadness. We can't understand our pleasure without experiencing our pain.
Both are important in our lives. It's important to feel it all. This is the principle of aliveness. When we spend our life just trying to be comfortable, to numb our pain, we're also numbing our joy.
We're also numbing our ability to love. Instead, in aliveness, we're opening ourselves to all of it. Yes, to the joy, to the laughter, to the love, to the connection, and also to the loneliness and the sadness and the rejection. But this means we're being alive. We're opening ourselves to all the experiences that exist.
So tool number one is to not judge your pain. Tool number two is to allow your pain, to dive into the wave. Now, I understand that most of us haven't been taught how to do this, that you might intellectually understand what it is to feel or allow an emotion, but you might also think, "Well, what do I do with it now?"
I have a super cute story. One of my daughters, when she would get really mad at me, she would roar at us. And it was the sweetest thing because it was a beautiful way for her to get the frustration out of her body without hurting anyone else. Today, my daughters, the other thing they love doing is screaming into pillows.
So when I tell them, "No, you can't watch more TV. No, you can't play more Nintendo," and they feel the frustration, they go into their beds and they yell at a pillow, which is another thing that we can do as adults. With them, I sometimes turn music and we, all the three of us, start dancing. And a lot of times I do it for myself so I can move the energy that is feeling icky or stuck or the sadness or whatever through my body, and it's incredible. After one, two, three songs that I really allow myself to move my body, to jump, to follow what my body wants to do, I feel a release.
It's similar to the release that you've probably experienced when you've had a really hard cry, and there's a moment that you kind of, like, take a deep breath and yes, you feel raw and vulnerable, but you know you've released so much pain.
So I've created a whole list of tools to help you release pain, to help you get into the wave, move the pain through your body so you can get to the other side.
Because as the poem I read to you earlier says, on the other side of pain, there is always peace and love. To download the guide with the tools, go to the link that is at the top of the description of this episode.
Put your name and email, and we'll email it to you. And I know some of these tools can make us self-conscious because the truth is that most people, we've never been trained. Nobody has taught us how to move our emotions. But give them a try. Try them, and then if you don't like it, don't do it ever again.
But just see what happens. I wanna challenge you in that. Don't judge your pain. Process your pain so you can get to the other side. Those are the steps basically. We recognize our pain, we see it's in our body, and then we do something with our bodies to process that pain to get to the other side of it.
Now, it doesn't mean that you dance a song and then you feel happy and perfectly fine. Sometimes you will, sometimes you won't, and then you go back to step one, to not judge yourself, to continue allowing it, because pain has its own journey. And depending on what's causing you pain, of course, if you're frustrated because a small thing you were expected didn't go through, that's probably pain that you can navigate in a shorter period of time.
But when we're talking about grief, when we're talking about bigger things, it might take us days or months, and that's okay. As you're experiencing pain, stay open for those moments of bliss. And I am gonna credit my friend Caroline as well because she was telling me about this.
When I was feeling so sad and the jacuzzi thing had happened and I was really feeling down and even feeling a little bit lost, she told me, "Caro, stay open to bliss. Bliss will surprise you. Bliss will come to you in moments where you are not expecting it." And that was exactly what happened.
Days after that hot tub event, I was in my car and I was driving when all of a sudden on Spotify, a song showed up, and I found myself singing it out loud and dancing in the car to it, and I was like, "Oh my God, I'm here. Wow, I do have an ability to feel happy again." And listen, another wave of sadness came, another wave of disappointment came.
Every time it's been coming since that conversation, I've been more and more conscious to be open to it, to dive into the wave, to allow myself to feel it, and therefore more moments of bliss, more moments of joy have been showing up. I wanna finish today's episode with a poem that I love about pain, and it's a poem written by another coach.
Actually, her name is Alexi Panos. You can find her on YouTube. But I think it's so beautiful, and I'm reading it also for all of you, but for me to continue to remind myself of why pain exists and what we're here to do with it.
Life isn't the way it's supposed to be. Life is the way it is. You see, life has this process that happens with or without us, called good, called bad, called pain, called pleasure, and it doesn't exclude any single one of us, no matter how good of a person you are.
Crazy, I know. But the question is, if we all experience pain, how do you deal with it? Do you ignore it? Do you explode? Do you retreat and go inwards? Or do you totally detach yourself from the situation and pretend like it never happened? Or do you use it as your greatest lesson to move forward and become the greatest version of yourself? You see, pain is one of our greatest teachers in life. It literally comes into our life, knocks us out of our comfort zone, shakes things up, and wakes things up. It forces us to look at who we are and where we are, and that is a gift.
You see, so many of us don't make the necessary changes that we need to make until we're forced to make them. We don't think about our health until we have a heart attack. We don't think about how we show up in the world until people break up with us repeatedly for the same reason. Pain is our greatest teacher if we allow it to be.
And as impossible as it may seem, when you're in the thick of your pain, in the depth of your heartache, that is when you pursue it with everything you've got, because life goes on, and it's moving on with or without you. So you either move on with it, becoming a better and better version of yourself, or you stand still, get stuck in the pain, and watch life pass you.
All right, my friends, let's pursue our pain with everything we've got. See you next week
