How We Create Our Own Suffering & How To Avoid It
If you're human, and if you're reading this I'm assuming you probably are, you've probably experienced pain and suffering in your life. It's part of the human condition.
Pain and suffering are very powerful and can really derail our lives. It changes our behaviour towards the people around us. It changes the thoughts we have about ourselves. It's why people develop addictions. In extreme cases, it's why people commit suicide.
We tend to think of pain and suffering as the same thing, but they're not. They're related, but there's a distinction.
It's really important to understand this distinction because, when you do, your sense of well-being and security is no longer dependent on the vagaries of circumstance. You won't be shut down by negative situations in your life. You’ll be able to avoid suffering.
Shinzen Young in “The Science Of Enlightenment” says that there is a formula for suffering:
Suffering = Pain x Resistance.
In other words, the degree to which we suffer is the degree to which we resist pain in our life.
We suffer in direct proportion to how much we resist pain.
By resistance, I mean interfering with the natural flow pattern of the pain. This is true whether the pain is physical, or emotional like anger, sadness, fear, or embarrassment.
Pain is a natural part of life. Again, it's part of the human condition. It's part of the bittersweet nature of life.
As we go through life, we experience pain on greater and greater scales; we move away, relationships break up, we get illness and disease, people die, we fail to achieve certain goals or dreams, we have bankruptcy or financial hardship.
So you can't avoid pain. Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. Suffering is a choice.
Suffering is the multiplication of the pain that we get by resisting it. We'll have something that's causing us pain, but instead of accepting it and working with it, we resist it by pretending it isn't happening, by trying to prevent it from happening, by saying it shouldn't be happening, that we don't want it to happen, that it's wrong or unfair that it's happening, or that we're not going to let it happen. When we're in that resistance, we're creating suffering – not just for ourselves, but for the people around us.
The reason we resist the pain is because we don't want to experience the feelings that come from the pain. Christian Mickelsen says all of our fears are fears of feelings.
So if we resist the pain, then we think we won't have to feel those uncomfortable feelings. But it actually backfires and makes things far worse. I'll give you a couple of examples from my life.
5 years ago, I went through a relationship breakup. We had been together for 7 years, so it was extremely painful. But I resisted the pain and created immense suffering for myself and for my ex-partner. I didn't accept that the relationship was over, and I tried to prevent it from ending because I didn't want to experience the feelings that came from the pain: that I was unlovable; that I was never going to find anyone else and I'd be alone for the rest of my life; that I wasn't man enough to keep her; that so much of my identity was derived from the relationship, and now that it was over, who would I be without her? So what was already a painful situation was made exponentially more difficult because of the suffering I created through my resistance.
4 years ago, I developed an autoimmune disease that affected my hands and basically stopped me from being able to play piano. That was extremely painful, both physically and psychologically. I was a musician, and now who would I be if I can't play? The thing I loved the most had been taken away from me. I had to give up on my dreams of being a professional musician. I thought it wasn't fair, that it shouldn't be happening. I lost my independence because I couldn't use my hands and had to rely on other people to do things for me. Rather than accept that and deal with it, I resisted mightily, and for the next two years, I suffered tremendously, and completely unnecessarily.
The key to reducing your suffering when there is pain in your life is to relax into it, feel it, and experience it fully because the pain has a message for you. Great learning and growth can come from experiencing pain.
Ray Dalio, the billionaire investor and philanthropist, says Pain + Reflection = Progress.
Don't resist the pain. Surrender to it. Trust the process of life. Human beings are the most adaptable animal on the planet. Know that you can acclimate to the pain, that you can develop coping and resilience. Know that you're right where you're meant to be, that you're OK. You're going through a transition in your life, so it's natural to experience this discomfort all the time. But know that it will pass, and you'll come out the other side of it as a stronger, wiser, more resilient, next-level version of yourself. Just keep going.