What kind of pain is it?
I have been a spiritual seeker for nearly 20 years. I’ve read piles of books, listened to a lot of teachers, attended retreats and studied various traditions and philosophies on the human condition. But recently, I heard Simone Seol talk about two types of emotional pain in a way that was really illuminating.
Being a human means being exposed to a full spectrum of feelings. Pain is part of that spectrum. If you’re human, you will feel pain...it’s just part of life. However, not all pain is the same: we experience clean pain and dirty pain. To be honest, I don’t love the terms ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’…they sound a bit judgmental. Feel free to substitute words you like better. For simplicity, I’ll stick with the terms clean and dirty.
Clean pain is the very real emotional pain that we feel when something unwanted happens that is beyond our control. Someone we love becomes sick or dies. Maybe we lose a job that brought us identity and purpose. We move to a different location and have to say goodbye to friends. Clean pain is unavoidable. It is uncomplicated in that it’s pure emotion. We can feel it without attaching a story to it.
Dirty pain, on the other hand, is what we experience when we tell a story about our situation, when we struggle with it, try to manipulate it, or avoid it. Let’s say we go through a breakup. Clean pain is feeling the loss and grief; dirty pain is obsessing for weeks, months, or years over what we did wrong. Dirty pain is ruminating about what an idiot our ex was (even though we still feel sad).
If we are passed over for a promotion, clean pain is the disappointment of not being chosen and the loss of an opportunity we’d hoped for. Dirty pain is criticizing ourselves for not being good enough, or talking smack about the person who got it.
Ironically, when we resist feeling clean pain we get stuck in dirty pain. Some people experience this in the dating world. Ever go through a breakup and jump right into something new in order to feel better quickly? How well did the new thing work out? When we allow ourselves to feel the true loss from the end of a relationship, we find, in time, the ability to move on.
A side note: there is no judgment here. There is nothing wrong with you if you find yourself in dirty pain sometimes; that is human. But when you can distinguish between the two, you are free to choose differently.
The spiritual teacher Mooji says that pain is unavoidable, but suffering is optional. Pain is the ‘ouch’, the sting of a real-life situation being beyond our control. Suffering is resisting, avoiding, story-telling, reacting, and criticizing. At first glance, suffering may seem easier than actually feeling the pain. In actuality, it perpetuates the pain and delays our ability to feel and move through it.
Have you noticed different types of pain in your life? And have you been able to feel clean pain without turning it into suffering or dirty pain? I would love to hear from you…leave a comment below, click here to set up a conversation, or hit me up on the socials.
And as always, may your week be filled with self-love and rich insights. With love, Amy ♡♡♡