# We can’t wait ##### Untangling Pain ---  --- ## tl;dr - “You can’t wait until life isn’t hard anymore before you decide to be happy” is the line I want you to take away. - Pain is horrible, but focusing only on fixing it can mean forgetting that we are still living a life. - Look for joy, pleasure, love, and ease: the things that help your nervous system feel safe. - You may not be able to do everything you used to, but there can still be things that bring you joy. - Do more of those things as an act of care. > [!abstract]- Transcript > > I wanted to finish this training with this quote that I actually came across the other day. I think it highlights perfectly what happens when we're in pain. > > I know this because I've been there. We get stuck in this obsessive thinking that we need to fix ourselves and to fix our pain before we carry on with our lives. > > It's that pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. > > I want you to take away this quote. This is by Nightbird. > > "You can't wait until life isn't hard anymore before you decide to be happy". > > I think if there's one thing I want you to take away, is that rather than just looking for the fixes to this pain, rather than focusing just on the pain, I want you to look for all the other stuff. > > The stuff that calms your nervous system. That brings you the joy and pleasure and love and ease. Look for all the things that make you and make your brain and your spinal cord and your nervous system feel safe. > > Now, I'm not ignoring the fact that pain is fucking horrendous at times. > > But sometimes we get so focused on the pain that we forget that we're still living a life. > > So to end, again, you can't wait until life isn't hard anymore before you decide to be happy. It might mean that you can't do the things that you used to do. And I get that. But there are things that do bring you joy, and those are the things that you need to be looking out for. Those are the things that our body needs us to look out for in order to calm our nervous system, to make us feel safe, to switch off those fire alarms. So look for the joy, look for the things that bring you peace and ease. And make your body and your nervous system feel safe and do more of that. > > That's what I want you to start focusing on. Not trying to fix something. But to look for the things that make your body feel safe and loved and cared for. > > So on that note, I am sending you the biggest hug to calm your nervous system and I want to just say thank you so much for watching. Sources → [[Sources – Untangling Pain#Module 1|Module 1]] Next lesson → [[Module 2 Lesson 01 – Welcome to Module 2|Welcome to Module 2]] %% - [[Pain is inevitable – suffering is optional]] - [[You can’t wait until life isn’t hard anymore before you decide to be happy]] - [[Focus on what brings safety, joy, and calm when it comes to pain]] %%