The Purpose of Pain: How to Turn Tragedy Into Triumph, Because Life’s not Supposed to Suck!

By Jay Nixon

Learn How to Turn Tragedy and Pain into a Catalyst for Growth and Success!

 

It's been said that pain is a fundamental part of life—a darkness that acts as a contrast to the light.

 

Most, if not all of us experience pain at some point in our lives, particularly the emotional pain of loss. While it may be true that pain is unavoidable, it doesn't have to lead to meaningless suffering. 

 

Pain can serve a far greater purpose in your life than something to be feared.

 

Jay Nixon, the bestselling author of The Overweight Mind: The Undeniable Truth Behind Why You're Not Losing Weightis back with a groundbreaking new book, The Purpose of Pain: How to Turn Tragedy into Triumph, Because Life's Not Supposed to Suck!

 

The Purpose of Pain is a transformational guide that shows you how to turn pain into a catalyst for change—how you can turn your story of tragedy into a life of triumph. In the book, Nixon chronicles his personal struggle with the pain of losing his father at age five in a devastating head-on car crash – an event that cast a two decade-long shadow over his life.

 

Using a combination of direct truths and a touch of humor, Nixon walks you step by step through the process he used to overcome the tragedy that had dominated his life, and turn it into a life of triumph and success. The result is a compassionate guide that anyone can use to conquer emotional pain in all of its many forms. 

 

In this book, you'll learn:

 

• How honoring your pain helps jumpstart the healing process 
• Tools and tactics to avoid tragedy that dictate your future 
• How to shift your mindset from victim to warrior
• How to use your pain for purpose instead of sadness 
• Why rituals are powerful and how to use them to heal 
• Permission to stop feeling guilty about claiming the happiness you deserve
• What the Personal Development Vortex is—and how to avoid it.
• ...and much more!

 

Most of all, you'll pinpoint the habits and thinking patterns you've been unconsciously using to sabotage your own progress, so you can overcome your pain and turn it into a catalyst for progress.

 

Jay Nixon is an internationally recognized transformation coach who has been profiled by ABS, CBS and FOX. He has also been featured in magazines such as Health and Triathlete. With his extensive coaching and speaking career and deep life experience, plus his witty but purposeful writing style, there's no one better qualified to explain the benefits (yes, benefits!) of suffering than Nixon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jay Nixon
• Release date: Jul 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781942761952

Jay Nixon

Jay Nixon is an internationally recognized transformation coach who has been profiled by ABS, CBS and FOX. He has also been featured in magazines such as Health and Triathlete. With his extensive coaching and speaking career and deep life experience, plus his witty but purposeful writing style, there’s no one better qualified to explain the benefits (yes, benefits!) of suffering than Nixon.

Book preview

Introduction

Most five-year-olds don’t do well with dates aside from Christmas and their birthdays. But I wasn’t most five-year-olds.

June 28, 1980. I remember that day like it was yesterday. It wasn’t my birthday, and we were only halfway to Christmas. But it has played a bigger role in my life than nearly any day since.

The sun rode high in the West Texas sky as I stood at the top of a hill close enough to my house that my mom could still see me. The heat was thick, but it wasn’t going to stop me from loading rock after rock into my little red wagon. This random day of summer vacation in sweltering West Texas marked the beginning of my own personal hell.

I had started my way down the hill when I saw the Texas Highway Patrol car snaking its way up our long and winding driveway. Even at five I sensed something wasn’t right. It wasn’t every day that a cruiser rolled up to our house.

I walked in the front door as an innocent and curious little boy trying to figure out what was going on. I didn’t know the next time I walked out that door, I would be broken.

I stepped into the house and looked around. My mom was weeping with the crushing sorrow reserved for tragedy.

My dad was dead.

He had not been sick. He was as healthy as a man could be when he left our house, but a head-on car crash took him from us. All my friends grew up with dads to lean on, to learn from, and to toss the football around with. On June 28, 1980, I was robbed of all of that.

I’ve heard people say, Pain is not a punishment. That five-year-old boy sure felt punished. I’ve also heard, Time heals all wounds. For twenty-five excruciating years, my life personified the contrary. I lived in a whirlwind of pain I thought would never diminish.

As I grew up, that pain affected every area of my life. I never took care of my body or my bank account as a young adult. Why? Because I had a car crash full of evidence telling me that people don’t live long enough for sustained health and wealth to be a concern. My relationships were tainted for decades because I lived with a very real fear of losing any people I loved. And although I grew up in a religious Texas town, my spirituality or any connection with a higher power was virtually nonexistent. It’s hard to blame a little kid for giving up on God when he loses the guy who means the most to him so abruptly.

The pain that started that hot summer day in 1980 didn’t let up for a long time. It was an unrelenting wave of emotional, mental, and physical suffering.

In truth, the suffering I endured didn’t need to happen.

My dad died once, but emotionally and mentally I watched him die every waking moment of the years that followed. Feeling the pain of such an enormous loss might be expected, but carrying the pain with me for decades was on me. I can’t blame my dad for that. I can’t blame God. I can’t blame the Universe. I chose the option of suffering instead of finding a purpose for my pain.

I took one event and allowed it to form the foundation of my story of pain, suffering, and victimhood. I was the kid whose dad died, and I played the role well. I let people feel sorry for me. I felt sorry for myself. I put the baggage of my dad’s death on my five-year-old shoulders and lugged it around for most of my life.

At some point, I realized I had the option of putting the baggage down.

This book is about letting go of the pain that weighs you down and discovering the purpose behind what’s been hurting you.

Everyone has their brand of pain. It’s subjective and depends on your life experiences. There’s no competition or ranking system; pain is pain. I don’t care if you lost a family member, were bullied as a kid, or got dumped by your high school sweetheart ten years ago. It’s all painful. It all hurts.

But what I’ve learned—and hope to communicate to you through the pages in this book—is that there is hope for you if you’re hurting. Pain is not a death sentence. Pain doesn’t have to determine how your life is shaped if you don’t want it to. By the end of this book, you will understand two very important things about pain.

First, there is a purpose for your pain. Tony Robbins has said, Life is not happening to you, it’s happening for you.¹ It’s the truth. In your moment of pain and despair, you may call bullshit, but I promise you that Tony’s statement is spot on. There is a reason you’re experiencing pain. If you can turn your attention toward that reason and embrace it, your life can transform into something unbelievable. On the other side of your pain stands the life you were born to live and love.

Second, pain doesn’t have to lead to suffering. Another important quote comes from Haruki Murakami: Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.² Since you are a human being, you are bound to experience pain. My father was killed. You may have lost a pregnancy, been fired, or have a strained relationship with your mother-in-law. Pain comes in many forms and flavors, but it will find you no matter how hard you try to live a life of sunshine and rainbows. You don’t have to stay in the shadows, though. Suffering is optional. It took me twenty-five years to understand Murakami’s truth. Pain will come, but you can opt out of misery.

Whether you picked up this book because the title spoke to you or because a friend recommended it, I know you’ve been hurt. Hell, it may not be past tense yet—pain may be your current reality. No matter when you felt it or how it happened, I’m glad you’re here. Your pain is likely different from mine, but it hurts just the same.

Death hurts.

Divorce hurts.

Watching your child be bullied hurts.

Recalling when you were bullied hurts.

An athletic dream ended by an injury hurts.

A squandered opportunity hurts.

Watching your bank account rapidly evaporate hurts.

Living a life of hopeless mediocrity hurts.

It all hurts.

This book is about turning hurt into hope and pain into purpose. It’s been a while since I decided to put down the baggage my five-year-old self picked up back on June 28, 1980. My life is nothing short of amazing now. I own my own business, I’m crazy about the woman I love, and I get to help people flourish in their health, fitness, and mindsets on a daily basis.

This book is my gift to anyone who is ready to step away from a life of pain. In the following pages, I’m going to show you how to take back ownership of your life. You don’t have to run out the clock in a state of misery. I promise.

These mountains that you are carrying, you were only supposed to climb.

~ Najwa Zebian

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1 Tony Robbins (@Tony Robbins), Twitter, November 10, 2016, https://twitter.com/TonyRobbins/status/1127740350557315073 .

2 Haruki Murakami, What I Talk about when I Talk about Running: A Memoir (New York: Vintage Books, 2008).

PART 1: PAIN

Chapter 1: Pain Personified: My Story

My pain began with the loss of my dad, but it didn’t end there. That event was merely the catalyst—the first chapter of my story. I wish it all began and ended with the car crash that took my dad’s life and seemingly destroyed mine, but the pain of loss and despair morphed into the repeating theme of my childhood and young adulthood.

While I fought fear, depression, and anger internally, my external world became an all-out war of trauma. Black clouds of emotion followed me around for decades, made worse as I continued to lose people I cared about. I lost my grandfather to emphysema ten years after my dad was taken. This time, as a fifteen-year-old, I was more aware of the loss. As a little kid, I remember asking people when my dad was coming home and when I’d see him again. I didn’t really get it. When my grandfather passed, though, I understood; I knew the two most important men in my life were gone before I was within shouting distance of manhood.

Fast-forward to late 1993: Christmas Day to be exact. I never really had what you might call a typical Christmas after losing my dad. While I did my best to embrace the holiday cheer swirling around me, it was hard to play into the joy, happiness, and light of the season with darkness in my heart. One man who did his best to make those dark times a little brighter was our next-door neighbor, Lonnie. He stepped up and filled my fatherless void in whatever capacity he could, at Christmas and throughout the year. On December 25, 1993, my family and I went over to wish Lonnie and his family a Merry Christmas and to exchange some gifts only to be hit with another curse. During our visit, Lonnie had a heart attack. I gave him CPR until the ambulance arrived, and then I watched him ride away, hoping that the EMTs could take care of him. He died later in the evening. Another man I trusted, cared for, and relied on was gone, and I was barely eighteen.

They say that deaths come in threes. Man, I wish I had been so lucky. Lucky may not be the word I’m really looking for here, but I would’ve been grateful for a reprieve from significant losses. Unfortunately, the pain kept coming. When I was twenty-five, just when I thought I could start living my life without being reminded of how brief it can be, my best friend put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

I’m not telling you all of this for shock value. I’m not sharing this with you to get sympathy. I just want to paint a clear picture of the type of pain I’ve experienced. By the time I was twenty-five years old, I had suffered enough loss to last a lifetime. I thought I was cursed. I thought I was being punished. I struggled mightily to go on living while death kept knocking on my door.

Looking back, the most difficult part for me is remembering how the loss of my dad hardened my five-year-old soul. That kid had no idea how to process the situation. Without a fully developed conscious mind, the only tools I had to operate with were the animal instincts of fear and self-protection. I built mental and emotional walls around myself that grew taller with each tragedy I encountered. I didn’t let anyone in because I was scared I might lose them if they got too close. I never came out from behind the wall. I was petrified of what might happen if I opened myself up to the world that had been so cruel to me.

I remained a scared little boy for decades. Fear was my mode of operation. You wouldn’t have known it had you met me back then, though. I didn’t look scared, at all. I wouldn’t allow myself that kind of vulnerability.

Instead, I was a tough guy. I truly believed I needed to become the man of the house at five years old, so a man I became. I felt that showing my emotions was weak. I sensed I needed to be strong. My inability to deal with my sadness and depression left me with anger and rage to spare; anyone who got in my way found out the hard way they had made a mistake. Hurt people hurt other people, and I was hurting like hell.

I was a beast on the football field. In a game where every play ends