Often, Fear manifests itself as pain. The most frightening thing in the world is pain.

All living beings are afraid of one thing, and that is pain. If you look deeply, you will find that people don’t fear even death as much as they fear the pain and agony they will undergo at the time of death! Many are afraid of poverty, many of relationships, and many others fear disease.

The root cause of all these fears is the pain that happens while going through these things. All these fears are because of the fear of pain.

Pain can be physical, mental or emotional.

Physical pain is a basic necessity for the body. Just imagine, if we could feel no pain in our body we might accidentally hurt ourselves or start styling our faces, hands, and legs the way we style our hair today! Actually, pain is a letter of request, written by the body to the mind, saying, ‘Please pay attention to me!’ because attention is energy. When attention is given to a particular area, that attention becomes energy for that area. When the body communicates pain, it is actually asking for attention or energy, which will help it heal.

Mental or emotional pain is the psychological feeling that arises when you are faced with something you don’t like. Research shows that emotional pain can deeply disturb the physical body. For example, the psychological feelings that arise with sexual repression can result in lower back disorders, or the pain of shouldering too much responsibility can cause pain in the shoulders.

Whether the pain is physical or emotional, an important thing you need to understand is that pain is always born from resistance to the present moment.

If a painful incident happens in one’s life like the loss of a child, the husband or wife leaving the spouse, the breakup of a close friendship, one suffers and then slowly accepts it over time. One may cry and brood many days and nights, but then one comes to accept what happened. Time heals. It is a common saying.

Understand that time is needed for healing only because you were not ready to face the pain and suffering in a conscious and aware manner at the time the incident happened.

If you can just look at the pain, if you can witness the emotion with awareness and see the play of the mind while experiencing pain, then the understanding dawns and instant healing happens. Time is needed because you are not ready to have the understanding. So you suffer a great deal. Over time, after some weeks, months, or even years, the incident fades and becomes a distant memory. However, the pain is not completely gone from your system. If you come across a person who even distantly reminds you of your lost child or husband, for example, if the person has a similar style of talking, walking, or laughing, the wound reopens. It hurts because you carry the memory of the past. Because of this, you feel life is too heavy a burden to bear. You choose to hold onto your entire past, when you were a child, when you were a teenager, when you first went to work, holding onto all the stages of life with all the experiences, pains and mistakes. That burden and load of your emotions associated with the past, is what causes you pain every time you experience the memory. If you decide to drop the past and look at every situation with a fresh perspective, you will not have so much pain. You will heal instantly. You will not need so much time.

source: Living Enlightenment