Befriending your Pain, Challenging your Suffering

Hi there lovely human,

Thank you for being here today and for taking the time to read and receive my offering.

Today’s brief exploration is about the delicate dance between pain and suffering. We will look at what the differences between the two are, where and how they intersect and interact. And most importantly, how we can relate to each of them in a way that supports our highest potential for self-expression, healing and embodiment of selfhood.

For me personally, it was (and is) in learning to love my pain that I allowed growth to find me. I let my pain feed and even nourish me - giving me what it came to give. And then, I consciously let go of the rest.

The key distinction here is to learn to embrace and even love the pain, and not the suffering. And to really know the difference between the two. Pain for one, is an inevitable part of life. We encounter experiences that hurt and even scar us. These pain-filled experiences can create an emotional and energetic scar tissue of sorts. It is our job, and our responsibility, to slowly accept and untangle what that scar tissue continues to mean to us on a day to day basis. How we learn to navigate pain forms part of the vital process of becoming an emotionally mature individual.

Suffering however, is when we have over-identified with our pain. It is when we have felt the pain and our mind has turned it into an elaborate story. A story that is often laden and densely enmeshed with themes of low self worth and fragile self-perception. Suffering is deep and can be truly and profoundly torturous. One thing to acknowledge about suffering is that often, our deepest experiences of suffering can be our greatest catalysts for change and awakening. They can alchemise something deep within and in so doing, they can become our biggest teachers. When this happens, our awareness to our suffering (the moment between being the suffering and having a wider perspective of it) highlights the very feeble nature of the mind (yet it’s strength to change our felt sense of reality so much so that we forget our truest nature as a divine expression of life itself). This is the only time suffering is helpful. But suffering (over-identification) does ask of us to forget our true nature. And it is this forgetfulness of our true wholeness that keeps us locked in the loops and cycles of suffering. Hence the importance of practices that keep us grounded in that truth: yoga, meditation, journaling, meditative walking, dancing, self-inquiry work etc.

The rest of the time it is our pain (not our suffering) that is the more sustainable teacher. It shows us where and how we meet challenge and adversity, it shows us where our boundaries lie and emphasises to us where we perhaps need to place more loving attention. Pain is there to serve you (in the long run), whereas suffering is there to teach you about the volatile nature of mind and can serve you in vital moments of your life’s journey but on an everyday/regular basis, suffering does not serve you. Chronic suffering = spending more time in the mind/ego.

Chronic suffering hinders and suppresses the truth of who you are and channels your vital life force energy into destruction rather than creation and expression.

When we have had to learn (and most people do at one point or another), through our lived encounters with life, to turn our pain and even our suffering into our gold - that is when we become alchemists. Turning mud into flowers, turning terror into delight and turning sorrow into gratitude. This is alchemy in the fullest sense of the word.

Through my own traversing of this relationship with pain and suffering, I have found that there comes a delicate point in the healing journey where you may notice yourself attaching to pain (and in more intense cases/moments, even your suffering) as the only teacher and facilitator of growth. And while it is important to thank it for its lessons and even excavate and dig around in that pain and suffering for those lessons, it is equally important to find and explore the myriad of other ways to find growth. And to consciously direct it. Learning to grow and find expansion through other means, like letting positive experiences have the same growth and emotional valence to you is so important.

And so, we are left thanking pain (and at times, suffering) for it’s deliberate encouragement of our expansion. Because that is, in the end, its primary offering to us.

To give pain the space to teach us what it must and then to let it move through (and past) us and our lives, is the gold. All the while knowing that it will return and you will learn to befriend and let it go all over again. And again.

Yours in love and healing,

Maria

Befriending your Pain, Challenging your Suffering

The Healing Root