Suffering Is Optional, Choosing Your Response

While pain is unavoidable, suffering is optional. Let's explore the distinction between the two and how we can allow ourselves to move more freely through the challenges of our lives.

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Transcript

Today's topic is suffering is optional.

So many of us experience such deep pain in the course of our lives.

I don't know if any of us can escape that experience entirely,

But there's a distinction between pain and suffering.

And suffering is something that we create in an active way.

And that may sound like a radical concept,

But that's what we're gonna talk about today.

So before we get started,

Let's take a minute or two to get present.

Let's take a deep breath in through your nose and hold it.

And imagine clean,

Crisp oxygen flooding your lungs,

Flowing into your bloodstream,

Nourishing all your cells,

All your organs,

Bringing vital life energy to your body and being.

And as you exhale,

Exhale any tension,

Stress,

Negativity,

Fatigue.

And now let's take another deep breath in through your nose and hold it.

This time,

Imagine brilliant,

Bright light lighting you up from the inside out,

Illuminating,

Electrifying,

And energizing all your cells,

Your molecules,

Your electrons,

Creating a brilliant beam of light and energy from your heart out into the world.

And as you exhale,

Exhale any remaining tension,

Stress,

Negativity,

Fatigue.

And now let's press our palms together,

Vigorously rub your hands together to feel the friction,

The temperature,

The pressure,

The motion,

The tickling and tingling when you stop.

And allow all those sensations to bring you present right here,

Right now into this remarkable physical form that enables us to experience life.

Welcome,

Welcome.

So today we're talking about suffering is optional.

And this conversation comes about as a result of an interaction that I had yesterday with someone who had lost their daughter due to overdose.

So a deeply tragic situation.

And this person has been,

Since that time,

Six years ago,

Or just about six years ago,

Interestingly,

They got breast cancer right at that time as well.

But since that time,

They have been just in such sorrow,

Grief,

Guilt.

And they just can't get over it.

Just deep,

Deep pain.

And we were able to have this conversation to talk about something that we talk about here quite a lot,

Which is we create our reality through the stories that we tell or the stories that we live into,

That we believe.

And this person had determined that they were responsible for their daughter's death,

That it was their fault because of something that had happened when the daughter was much younger.

And the daughter had a pretty fraught or challenging life before that.

May have been bipolar,

Was into drugs early,

Was really difficult to contend with growing up.

And anyway,

It was very interesting and powerful to have a conversation to say,

Well,

What's the story?

And the story was that the mom was responsible,

That it was her fault that her daughter committed suicide through overdose in her 40s.

And I think this is an important conversation because we tend to get very myopic and reductionist about so many things in life.

And what occurred in this situation was that the mother allowed her daughter a particular portion of the relationship to overshadow everything else.

So she wasn't taking into consideration all the support that she had given the daughter.

She wasn't taking into consideration the possibility that it was indeed her support that enabled the daughter to live as long as she did.

And she created sort of a twisted,

Idealized version of her daughter's life and her engagement with her daughter's life and wasn't looking at the whole picture.

And she became very fixated on that interpretation.

And the more she told herself that that was true,

The more she believed it to be true.

And so she was in this loop of self-blame and self-destruction,

Really.

And so in our conversation,

We were able to just sort of widen the perspective to say,

Hey,

You know what?

There are all kinds of parts of this picture that you're not looking at.

So you're laser focused on this one place and yes,

You have regrets.

And it's a gross oversimplification to believe that that was the only factor that impacted your daughter's life.

So the pain of loss and the sadness,

Of course there's sadness,

Right?

And she said,

Interestingly,

She said that she comforts herself when she's able to by thinking that maybe now this very troubled person is at peace.

But through conversation,

She was able to recognize a broader picture.

And I think that this whole interaction really encapsulates the mechanisms of suffering.

Yes,

We can feel pain.

We will inevitably feel pain,

Physical pain,

Emotional pain.

Pain is something that happens.

It's when we dwell on that pain,

Like it's one thing to process it and to allow it to move.

It's another thing to keep revisiting it and telling ourselves stories that make that pain persist.

And the thing about sadness and grief,

Sorrow,

Is that it's not ever-present.

What came up for her was that she felt guilty if she were happy,

Because how could she be happy when she had a daughter who died?

And this is something that so many of us punish ourselves with,

Like in some way thinking that it might be disloyal to enjoy our own lives when we've had a loss or some kind of tragedy.

Like we don't deserve to be happy.

And there are so many nuances to this conversation,

But one is be sad when you're sad.

And we don't need to perpetuate it.

It was like she had a whip and was whipping herself constantly with this tragic series of events that occurred that were very much a part of a larger dynamic.

And so once again,

What we're talking about is how dramatic the experience can be when we fixate on one aspect of a larger story.

And the thing to understand is that we do create our experience of reality.

If nothing else,

The thing that I learn on a daily basis from my clients and in my own experience as I'm learning to apply that awareness is how completely mutable reality is.

That by shifting our story,

We shift our lives.

And so she was able,

Rather than this myopic view and this hyper focus on one particular element of a much larger story,

She was able by expanding that focus to see a bigger picture,

Which allowed her to recognize that her story couldn't possibly be true.

And in believing that her story was true,

She was kind of absolving her daughter from any responsibility for her own life.

We all make our own choices.

It doesn't mean that it's not sad or that we don't experience it as sad.

But it doesn't mean that we need to be sad all the time.

So emotion comes in waves.

Sorrow,

Grief comes in waves.

It's not a linear process.

And we get to continue to live our own lives as well.

It's all about context.

It's all about how we contextualize our experience,

What perspective we take on our experience,

What interpretations.

And so if we wake up every morning saying,

Effectively,

I killed my daughter kind of thing,

You're going to create a very different life from today is the next day of my life.

There are multitudes of other ways to be living.

There are multitudes of stories to tell and we are the authors of our lives.

Maybe not all the circumstances,

But most certainly the interpretations.

And that's not to say that we don't inherit lots of the interpretations from our upbringing,

Where we're often programmed into certain stories that we don't even recognize that we've been programmed into,

Certain assumptions that we just carry because that's what we've been taught.

There's nothing more important than the story than questioning our stories,

Particularly if we're in pain.

And so this person was saying,

I don't want to be sad anymore.

I can't bear being sad anymore.

And so that was an invitation to say,

Well,

What's the story that you're telling yourself that's making you sad?

What might be another way to view these circumstances?

It gets back to,

Is the glass half empty or half full?

The glass has the same amount of water,

Whether it's half empty or it's full.

The water in the glass is the water in the glass.

And then we say it's half empty or it's half full.

There's a lot of social pressure to believe certain things.

And I think this notion of what we believe and the stories that we tell goes really deep.

I tend,

I mean,

If we think about the three minute mile,

I think it's the three minute mile.

I always get confused about this,

But it was an impossibility until someone did it.

And then once someone did it,

Other people could do it.

Why?

Because they believed it was possible.

The story changed.

The story changed.

And it's,

There's nothing more important in my belief,

My opinion,

At this time in human history to recognize how powerfully important our stories are.

I was talking about this book that I'm listening to called,

What If We Get It Right,

About climate change.

Because we have a story,

A collective story that has a lot of traction at the moment that we're doomed.

For people that are engaged in recognizing that we're in a climate emergency,

That something has to change,

That there's stuff going on here.

I mean,

A lot of people are burying their heads in the sand,

But for people that are aware,

There's a story about how we have devastated the planet and essentially we're doomed.

And what if instead of that story,

We create one of possibility.

We have all kinds of knowledge,

All kinds of technology.

The thing that's missing is the will.

The will on a grand enough scale.

And so what do we do to activate that will?

Part of it is letting people understand that there is,

That we can make a difference,

That we can turn things around,

Or that they're salvageable at the very least.

This is a really important time to be curating our stories.

And part of that story is foundational things like our pugilistic,

Fighting,

Boxing kind of nature.

I don't even know that it's our nature,

But it's an undercurrent in our culture that is so deep that we rarely see it.

This language of violence is so incorporated into our collective consciousness,

At least here in the US.

We're gonna fight for our rights.

We're gonna crush it.

We're gonna dominate it.

We're gonna kick their butts,

Right?

It's everywhere.

Even in what we would consider positive motivation.

And it's all,

That conversation is one based in separation.

And that kind of othering allows us to do all kinds of horrific things to other people and to the planet.

So this story thing is super important and recognizing that suffering is optional,

That it's the stories that we're telling ourselves that are perpetuating patterns of pain.

And while it may be simple to change our story,

It's not necessarily easy.

Not necessarily easy because in so many cases,

We've inherited those stories by things we were told when we were kids.

About who we are,

About how the world is,

About what's true and what's real.

And these beliefs and these stories become so deeply entrenched that we're willing to die for them,

So many of us.

And so many of us are killing ourselves with them.

With these beliefs.

Sometimes slowly over time,

Sometimes not so slowly.

We're willing to go to war over certain ideas.

And I'm not saying,

Because I really don't know that there are circumstances where there's no other option.

Maybe,

You know,

That I think we get to press ourselves to be exploring other options to these paradigms that have made themselves,

That are so deeply entrenched that we don't even recognize them or we can't even consider that there's another option.

So for our personal suffering,

Let's look.

Let's have the courage to look at where we're suffering and to look at what,

To ask ourselves,

What would I have to believe in order to feel this way?

And where might that belief come from?

And what is being called for in order to heal,

In order to dissolve that pattern?

There's no more important thing we can do.

Because when we do this on a personal level and we transform ourselves,

Whether it's our suffering or our rigidity about things,

Our deeply entrenched convictions,

It's not to say that there's not value to those convictions.

And we get to look and see in a conscious and deliberate way what's going on with that.

What is it about?

Are we choosing it or are we at the effect of it?

It's important.

And it's the path to freedom for all of us.

To free ourselves from this unconsciousness that allows us to continue perpetuating pain for ourselves,

Perpetuating systems that are destructive.

So that's the invitation for today.