When #Pain is Good for You

Mr Holdsworth compares painful exercise to mortification.

A loose transcription:

Over the past few years I’ve reluctantly become one of those people who #exercises consistently… and as hard as it is for some people to believe, I've actually grown to like it. Do you know the kind of person I mean? The kind that’s always promoting #healthy #living punctuated by an emphasis on exercise? And not the kind of exercise that most people with a gym membership mime; like the kind that’s all about yoga pants and smoothies and ten minutes on a treadmill while gossiping and watching the bachelor. I’m talking about the kind of exercise that is painful. The kind that brings your muscle groups to failure with each round. The kind that stresses your body to the limit. Anybody who is unfamiliar with that kind of regimen, or worse, someone who’s tried it once or twice and gave up, will be utterly confounded by the kinds of people who make that a part of their daily lives. Even more so is making sense of the fact that the people that are consistent about a routine like that, will tell you that they actually like it. And I can understand that scepticism and the nagging question of why someone would put themselves through that and how that level of physical disruption and discomfort can be logically reconciled with the insistence that it’s worth it or even, somehow, some way, enjoyable. What most people looking in from the outside don’t understand is that at a certain level of persistence in that pattern of deliberate discomfort and even pain, you cross a threshold where the effects start to take shape… and those effects tend to outweigh the cost.
Now I can tell you what some of those effects are: like having more energy, more strength, an improved mental state that affects aspects of your entire life, and a higher tolerance for physical discomfort. but simply hearing what they are is nothing to compared to actually experiencing them. Most people will hear that and still think that the cost is higher than the return and yet, there’s no other way to explain why the people who do it day in and day out refuse to stop. They’ve discovered something that you can’t understand without experiencing yourself and this, for me, is one of my favourite depictions of what #faith is. There are reasonable explanations for a lot of things you might be reluctant to embrace, but it requires enough trust and conviction for you to act upon those ideas to discover what lies behind them. The people that are willing to endure the kind of #discomfort that comes from intense #physical exercise had to tolerate a period of time at the beginning where they weren’t experiencing those good effects. They had to trust that the process would work and that those effects, once experienced first hand, would be worth the price. That kind of trust is exactly what #Faith is. You don’t fully understand until you place your life in a pattern that someone else has revealed and discover that it’s the real thing. That is exactly what my experience of embracing #Catholic #Christianity has been. This describes a principle that #Christians have tried to communicate for over 2000 years but often get a lot of push-back on. It’s this idea that a process of #pain and #suffering, if embraced, can transform us into better versions of ourselves. It makes us stronger and more courageous. It teaches us how to be masters of ourselves instead of slaves of our appetites. And when combined with #spiritual reflection and disciplines, it produces #wisdom and insight. #Catholics call this #mortification. It’s what #Jesus described when he said that we need to learn to pick up our own #cross if we want to follow him. The reality is, our lives are punctuated by suffering. We will all experience mental and physical pain. We will all experience illness and ageing. We will all experience the loss of loved ones. And then we ourselves, will experience the loss of our own lives. How are we preparing to face those trials? Because if we are taking every opportunity to avoid discomfort and pain, then we will struggle to rise to those occasions with courage and dignity. But if we can learn to embrace that dimension of life when it isn’t being forced upon us, then we will know how to manage it when that time comes. That’s what true #courage and #dignity looks like.