Pain & Suffering

Pain and suffering.

We often hear the words together — so often that their meanings have become one and the same.

But in reality, they’re quite different.

You may have heard the common quote, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”

Pain is inevitable, a fact of life.

There isn’t a creature or being alive who hasn’t experienced some kind of pain sometime and will live to experience it again, whether it’s physical, psychological, or emotional.

We know we can count on it, and yet we spend most of our time trying to prevent it.

Pain is not suffering.

Suffering is our reaction to pain.

Anger, denial, rejection, repression, fear, greed, and hatred are all, at their source, reactions to pain. More specifically the ego’s reaction to pain.

Ego takes pain very personally.

Pain reinforces its sense of separateness.

Pain is a “something” to be gotten rid of or prevented.

“I don’t want this pain,” “Get rid of this,” “Something’s wrong with me,” and “This shouldn’t be happening” — are all things the ego might say during a painful experience.

The ego takes pain and adds suffering to it until the two are so intertwined that it’s easy to see why we take the two words to mean the same thing.

The suffering we add to pain is often after the fact.

I have a painful experience, then I try to figure out how I can arrange my life so that I don’t experience that pain again.

I am willing to make sacrifices for security, for control.

For instance, I might stay with work I hate because I’m afraid of being dependent — both painful experiences.

Or having experienced the pain of an unreturned, one-sided love, I now say goodbye to lovers before they can say goodbye to me.

We suffer when we are not willing to feel pain.

We close ourselves off. We dig trenches. We put up barricades. We develop “sensitive” radar systems and when provoked, we attack, all because we don’t want to feel pain.

All because pain frightens the ego.

The ego is vulnerable in its presence — vulnerable to being found out.

When we stay with the pain and don’t add the ego’s suffering to it by closing ourselves off, we see that we are in fact equal to that pain, that we can “take it”; we see through the ego’s game of inadequacy.

We see the wholeness and truth of our essential being. And when we see that, like everything else, no one pain lasts forever.

Short story with perspective:

I have lost my favorite Stanley Cup. I have two choices.

• I can have lost my Stanley and be miserable

• I can have lost my Stanley and be all right

In either case, the teacup is gone.

Not everyone understands what the word “ego” means.

For me, it took probably 5 books and 1 teacher (RJ Spina) for it to actually click in my mind.

What is ego?

The illusion that I am separate from everything else.

The part of me who’s always comparing, the part who feels superior, or inadequate, or deprived.

It is the one who clings and resists, who sees me as subject and everything else as object.

It is the source of my suffering.

“Why is it an illusion? You are separate, aren’t you? How can you be more than what you are? You’re a person — and a very specific one at that. You’re not your uncle Jim. You’re not a dog, a flower, a rock, and everything else that is. You are you.”

Yes, I am me, but what animates me is what animates Uncle Jim, the dog, the flower, the rock, and all that is.

We are packaged differently, but we share the same essence. There are many of us and we are not the same, but we are all one.

How did this illusion of separateness get started?

Perhaps we bring it with us at birth or are just born with the capacity to develop it, and as we grow older, it is reinforced through years of conditioning.

Maybe the reason we’re here in the first place is to become aware of it so that we can let go of it.

But if we’re born with it, doesn’t that mean it’s good, that its natural? Why should we get rid of it?

It’s not a matter of “should” or “good” or “getting rid of.”

It is a matter of ending our suffering.

When we are ready to do that, we will.

The degree to which I am proud/delighted/smug when I am “right” is the degree to which I will suffer when I am “wrong.”

If I don’t need to take credit, I don’t need to take the blame.