Pain Happens, Suffering Is A Choice
We May Rise Above The Suffering
by Gustave Deresse
“Is suffering a choice?”
It was a comment made on a recent post on the concept of pain vs suffering, and I was happy for the opportunity to go ahead and explain my take on the subject. Here I wanted to share the same information with you.
Coming from angles both neuroscientific and from the spiritual philosophy of Buddhism:
We may need to be aware of our pain in order to treat ourselves accordingly, but to dwell on any given issue is counter-productive. Suffering is the act of dwelling on the pain.
Necessary Pain
Physical pain is a direct result of our nervous system communicating injury or even potential injury of our person to our brain. Personally, I think of when I burn myself while cooking busily on the job. I quickly aim to grab a pair of tongs that have been pushed too far onto the flat-top, and immediately nerves are shooting signals to my brain that I may have damaged the skin on my hand!
These signals are vital to understand, as we can assess the precise bodily location to consider treating. In the case of my burns, a dab of aloe vera an ice-cold cloth applied to the hand in question.
As for psychological pain, it’s generally tied directly to our emotions, and is almost exclusively suffering by default. There isn’t a mental illness that cannot be cured by the mind itself, from depression to autism, as is suggested by numerous scientific studies around the world. A good resource for learning more about this topic is The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge.
Futility in Suffering
The difficulty, without being a super practiced meditator, is to take control of the pain process as to not reach a point of suffering. The goal is to change our perception of the pain, to accept it into our reality, and to redirect our focus to other, more positive things.
We don’t want to center the pain. We don’t want to dwell on the pain. That would be to suffer.
With deeper meditation practice over time, our brains can even learn to autonomically constrain pain signals to the barely needed minimum. After all, we only need to be conscious of where it hurts and how bad it is so that we can treat the issue.
Then there are the cases where we must accept that there is nothing we can do to treat the pain, where our goal would become to inhibit the pain signals entirely. The closest I have personally come to achieving this has had more to do with high adrenaline levels than anything. It’s early still.
As for psychological pain, we must modify our perspectives of what we require to be satisfied in life. We each as humans tend to create a model of reality in our minds, and in this model we see the desires without which we cannot be happy, and this leads to suffering when these desires remain unfulfilled.
This is most difficult when pertaining to the loss of those we love, as humans do form incredibly strong emotional attachments. The more permanent the loss, the more difficult it can be to accept it. Yet it isn’t impossible to move forward from loss, and it is what we must do. The pain may be inevitable, but we mustn’t suffer.
In Conclusion
Pain is natural, and we need to acknowledge it to an appropriate extent.
Suffering is normal, but it isn’t required, or recommended.
There is much more to be said on this topic, but I hope to have helped you find some clarity on the comparison between pain and suffering, and perhaps taught you something about how to exercise your ability to overcome each.
You can check out the original post as I uploaded it to Instagram here: Post
Thank you for reading, and I wish you well.
- Gustave
