This is part of an ongoing series of articles on business and life coaching by Hutt Valley lawyer and coach, John Gray. You can find his first book, “Who’s Following This Conversation?” on amazon.com.

There is a saying that goes something like this:

“It is better to have been pricked by the thorn than to have never experienced the Rose.”

What this means is that if we want to experience love and joy in our lives then we also need to be prepared to experience hate and pain. Where we experience the strongest feelings of love and joy in our lives is also where we experience some of our most intense feelings of hate and pain.

All of us have “back stories” which are testament to this truth and it is these stories that we wear as badges of honour and courage. Usually these stories involve those closest to us such as family, spouses or friends, or the loss of our health or peace of mind. It is these very areas which hold the potential for extreme emotions. It is true to say that the bigger the feeling of joy the bigger the potential for feeling pain.

While life in this physical realm offers each and every one of us the potential to experience intense feelings of love and joy it is also because we live in the realm of duality that life seeks to balance these good feelings with intense feelings of hate and pain. This is just the way it works – there is no bias or judgement about what our preferences may be. One cannot exist without the other. It is the tension between opposites that allows anything to manifest on the physical plane. Without “bad” we cannot experience “good”. Without the oppositional counterpoint there can be no point of reference. How would we know what “love” felt like unless we also knew what “hate” felt like. How would we know what “joy” felt like if we hadn’t experienced “pain”, “peace” if we hadn’t experienced “war” and so on.

So for those of us who seek to create lives unaffected by bad stuff, we seek in vain. While being more consciously aware of how we create our own personal realities through where we place our focus assists us in producing the states and things we want from life we will never be able to rid ourselves completely from experiencing the “prick of the thorn.” If by some small chance this were to happen the world as we know it would cease to exist.

When we live our lives in fear of being hurt we become contracted and our lives close in around us. We create our own prisons in which we pretend that we will be safe from the “slings and arrows” that life can throw at us. Consequently while we may live our lives in an illusion of safety, what is the point of this if we are not fully expressing ourselves and living life to the fullest? Wouldn’t it be better to have lived one day passionately and fully doing everything you had ever wanted to do rather than living 50 dull and boring years not doing what you really wanted to do because you were scared of what may happen if you did let go?

Why would you want to prolong a life in which you are not really living at all?

The news is that this is what most of us are doing right now. We convince ourselves that we cannot do what we want to do because if we did we would lose everything including our small lives. So we continue to work in uninspiring jobs with people we cannot stand all because we are afraid that we will lose everything we have strived for and eventually die. Well guess what – we will all die eventually and we can take nothing with us! We are born with nothing except ourselves and we will die the same way.

Isn’t it more important how we live our lives than how long we live?

The central message then is that we should not hold back from experiencing the life we have always dreamed of for fear of pain or death. If we do we will miss out on the best that life has to offer. We must remain “open hearted” and “vulnerable” if we are to smell the rose of life in full bloom. The world is full of pricks anyway so it’s only a matter of time before you get scratched. When you feel hurt be open enough to experience that feeling fully and then move on. It is only when we resist these feelings that we create a lifetime of problems for ourselves.

Remember that it is through the experience of the bad stuff that we learn and evolve. Our purpose is to evolve as spiritual beings and our short stay here on planet earth is part of the process of personal and collective evolution. It is through our “Big Hearts” that we remain connected to our spiritual DNA and unlimited consciousness which manifests in our lives as intuition. When we are open to intuitive guidance our lives become easier and we feel at ease with what we experience in our daily lives whether good or bad.

Wake up ,take Heart and smell the roses!