Table of Contents

Super Power of Pain vs Smallness of Suffering

Attitude to Life

All of us, during the course of life will experience and will have experienced many things. However, it is our attitude to life and these life events that shape our life going forward.

There is a quote that has personal meaning for me, especially so since having an unexpected stroke in May 2021. It is often attributed to the Dalai Lama, as well as other motivational and inspirational public figures. Simply, yet matter of factly, it says “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional”

As we know, simple statements can be loaded, so in the following text I will share my interpretation of it with you.

Inevitability of Pain

Pain in all it’s inevitability, whether that be physical, mental, emotional, is uncomfortable and agitating. When we experience pain, it has the ability to drive us forward because of those attributes alone. When we choose suffering it becomes comfortable in it’s familiarity. Suffering has the ability to hold us in the moment, playing on repeat the motions and emotions of the original pain, albeit somewhat numbed.

Pain can move us toward healing. Healing creates growth on all levels within our life. Suffering holds us in a mentality of unfairness. We stagnate when we chose suffering.

Pain in its momentum to propel us forward will create change: in our thinking, in our behaviours, in our life circumstances, as well as in our relationship statuses. Using pain as a positive motivator we can venture toward our future with valuable and usable experiences that will not only empower ourselves but those around us, including those who seek our service.

Suffering is a Choice

The choice to suffer, which is often an unconscious decision, closes the space around us and shuts us off from any discernable perspective. We then find ourselves in a place where we believe in the justification of how bad things are for us, how cruel events were, often descending us into victimhood. In suffering we allow ourselves to be on the receiving end of our thoughts and feelings and whatever life throws at us. In being this way we reduce our own power of being. The circumstances we find ourselves in become our identity. We hold ourselves in the past moments and events along with the thoughts and feelings of that time. In choosing to suffer we turn ourselves against engaging with the world around us and life as it really is.

Experiences in Life

Life is no more than a series of moments that become events, interactions that may or may not become relationships, all for us to experience in one way or another. Some of those experiences last longer than others. Some of those experiences will be more advantageous for us than others. Some of those experiences will be more positive than others. Some of those experiences will be enjoyable, some will be painful. Some life experiences will be easier to bare than others. But that is life, nothing more, nothing less: an experience. A fleeting series of experiences and events lived on a tiny speck of a planet, no more than a grain of sand in the huge immeasurable universe.

Pain Is Immediate

It is important to remember that we have the free will and ability to choose as to whether we enjoy our time here or endure it.

It is also imperative for us to understand it is not possible to eliminate suffering by eliminating pain. Our human existence, our reason for coming here from the spirit world, is to experience the inevitable challenges of life: people we love being injured, those close to us dying, we will be sick, friends and lovers will betray us, to name just a few examples. Pain is therefore unavoidable during our time here. Curiously, pain is the one thing that is immediately recallable by the human psyche at any given moment. This means we humans are exceptional at willingly exposing ourselves to inordinate amounts of pain whenever we chose to do so!

To Avoid is to Suffer

The “siren song” of human suffering is avoidance. Avoidance is the immediate consequence of our thoughts instructing us to suppress, control or eliminate the experience responsible for the pain we have. This avoidance and the consequences of it, contribute to us having a narrow focus both on our life and the experiences we go through. In addition, we develop an inflexible approach to life and run the risk of ignoring opportunities it may present us. Our views become skewed and distorted to suit our own suffering. We find blame in the initial pain and some kind of comfort in the chosen suffering.

That comfort comes because our suffering is known and familiar. Our life then becomes one lived in the motions, our senses dulled yet we are reactionary and triggered in many ways. We will find ourselves on autopilot and living in a repetitive cycle. We continually function in ways to avoid facing the cause of our suffering head on. Our lives become dominated by avoidance and escape rather than living a life of natural attraction. When we chose to live in suffering our important life decisions become based on how to avoid distressing personal memories rather than moving forward. Forward toward learning what it is that we value deeply as well as what it is we want to achieve and change.

In languishing in our own suffering we lose our direction in life. In the comfort of our self imposed anguish we lose sight of our goals and our dreams disappear because we are blinded by our choice to suffer. We tend to lose sight of our internal compass headings because we become all too busy monitoring the risk of creating change, of moving forward, of growing, of healing.

Healing Honestly

The pathway to our healing is choosing not to suffer from the pain we have experienced. Of course, we have to acknowledge that is healthy to have unpleasant feelings and thoughts arise at the times of distress and pain – we are human after all!

But after a time, we must acknowledge that our thoughts and feelings about a moment in our personal history during our time here on this planet does not define who and how we are. We can only do this by processing honestly the thoughts and feelings of that moment in time, allowing them to be raw and agitating, ultimately motivating us toward our own growth.

Act Toward Acceptance

In processing and reflecting on our emotions and thoughts, we will find ourselves ending up in a place of acceptance. Acceptance is the opposite to avoidance. The acceptance of a moment in our personal history involves us engaging with the rich complexity of our emotions and reactions repeatedly until there is some kind of neutrality to the exact event. In doing so, we invite a learning and a compassion for ourselves that will naturally extend to others.

In accepting, we can experience our thoughts just as they are, in that moment as thoughts. We can then do the same with our feelings and this naturally will extend our memories of the event. All belonging to a moment. No more, no less than. It is a process that needs practise.

It is when we practise the act of acceptance, we will heal. When we practise the act of avoidance, we suffer repeatedly.

Endure or Enjoy Life

It may be good for us to know at this point that it takes us just as much effort and energy to practise avoidance and suffering as a way of life, as it does to have acceptance and healing as a way of life.

So, it is our personal responsibility to chose how we are to experience our life here – to endure or enjoy it. Are we going to keep moving forward through the experiences of our lives here or will we allow ourselves to stagnate? Will we chose for our inevitable pain in life to become a blanket of suffering, making us small and rigid that will invariably cut us off from our connection and compassion for ourselves and for others that cross our path? Or alternatively, will we can chose for our pain in life to become our super power, propelling us to a deeper level of understanding, compassion and love for ourselves that will naturally radiate out and encapsulate others that we encounter on our journey through this life.

Super Power

Healing like pain is agitating, confronting and uncomfortable. Also like pain, healing demands our attention and focus. To be healthy in this world we live in, we have to heal – the word healthy even tells us that in its spelling! Lets us live with the inevitability our pain, not suffer from it. Let us all develop a super power from pain, growing and progressing as we make our way through life.

Written by Helen van Hooft. Medium, Healer, Transformation Consultant, Tutor, Writer and Speaker

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