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.
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