I don’t remember what I was reading, but I vividly remember this quote: “Pain is of the body and suffering is of the mind”. I wrote it down in my journal immediately. This stuck with me. I have suffered (there is that word again) from anxiety since I was a little girl. I would lose sleep imagining the impending Big Earthquake I heard about in school would hit or worrying about burglars breaking in through my window. I created and still create this kind of suffering.
However, an example that jumps at me when I think of this quote is the pain/ suffering of childbirth. We have all heard that child birth and labor is the most excruciating pain a women will experience. We hear horror stories of births gone wrong, or emergency c-sections. These stories stick with us and for many women create fear long before the actual pain of child birth even begins. In many ways, this post relates greatly to my post on fear. When we are fearing something, we are suffering. It is not physical pain that creates this suffering, it is our own thoughts around the pain/ event that creates and magnifies suffering.
I always knew I wanted to have children, since I myself was a child. But I was determined to figure out a way to bypass the pain.
“Oh I will just schedule a C- section before I even hit labour…Voila” I thought in my 10 year old brain. Like, who in their right mind would go through that pain voluntarily? That is INSANE. As I came into adulthood the urge to become a mother became stronger and the realization that in Canada you can’t just “schedule” a Cessarian also sunk in. I started to shift my thinking. I started to read all the books around pregnancy and childbirth. My sister in law who had been practicing to be a doula mailed me amazing books such as Ina May Gaskins’ “Guide to Childbirth” and P. England and R. Horowitz “Birthing from Within.” In particular, Ina Mays book focused on a new way to think about pain in childbirth. She told stories of beautiful births. She wrote about ways to visualize contractions as a way of helping baby out and not associating it with “the worst pain of your life.” Changing the story surrounding childbirth helped turn my childbirth experience into one of strength, inner wisdom and beauty, instead of one about pain and suffering. I still experienced incredible “pain” while giving birth, however the words I surrounded the pain with included phrases like ‘wow, that was a good one’ or ‘that one is gonna help get this baby out.’ I changed the narrative in my head, and therefore reduced the suffering associated with the pain.
With this said, suffering and pain are important aspects of our human existence. We ALL suffer. We ALL experience pain. How we respond, grow and learn from these experiences can either elevate us to a new level or leave us in a world of despair, drowning and identifying with the many things that cause the suffering. If the latter becomes true, we become victims of our own circumstances. Our suffering grows. We become part of a cycle of suffering within our own minds. Eckhart Tolle writes about ‘conscious suffering’ in his book “A New Earth: Awakening to Your Lifes Purpose.” In it he makes it clear that suffering is an important part of the human experience and he himself was near suicide before he was able awaken from the self made suffering in his mind. The reality is, we all suffer and the thought “I should not have to suffer” as Tolle explains, actually increases the suffering. What we resist, persists… right? Tolle’s writing encourages us to become aware of our suffering – to “say yes to suffering before (we) can transcend it.”
To conclude, when we become more aware of the suffering we cause ourselves, whether it is associated with physical pain, mental anguish, emotional upset, grief or otherwise, we become aware of the immense roll our minds play in our day to day feelings and emotions. The more awareness we bring to our state of consciousness at any given moment the easier it will become to move through states of suffering as opposed to living in a state of suffering.
Reflection
- What does pain look like for me? How do I respond to physical pain? What words go through my mind?
- How do I define suffering? What is my suffering most often linked with?
- What is one example where I created my own suffering? What kinds of thoughts were running through my mind?
- Can I become aware and curious the next time I feel a sense of suffering? What kind of thoughts or stories do I tell myself when I am in a state of suffering?
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