Whenever I hear the very important lesson that “every human being wants to be happy, and no one wants to be in pain,” I agree… mostly.
On the one hand, this axiom is an incredible help in coming to a shared understanding of our common humanity. We can use the principle that everyone wants to be happy as the beginning of a kind of secular ethics. If we all want to be happy and none of us want to be in pain, then “good” things are those that make people happy and alleviate suffering. “Bad” actions are those that increase pain and suffering in the world.
So, if you are looking for a meaningful life or trying to figure out the purpose of life, the answer is quite simple: alleviate suffering. Seek to improve the lives of others just a little bit. From an Eastern philosophical perspective, you were incarnated into a body to do just that. The end of suffering is the freedom that we are truly seeking on the spiritual path.
However, there is one huge caveat to all of this, which is why I said “mostly” earlier. Human beings consensually and willingly enter into painful situations all the time. Sometimes we want to; sometimes we have to. Whether it’s elite athletes pushing their bodies to the brink of exhaustion, going to the dentist for that long-awaited root canal, or couples bringing whips and chains into the bedroom, suffering is more than just part of life. It’s often a requirement for us to get what we truly want.
The narrative that “everyone wants to be happy, and no one wants to be in pain” is an oversimplification of the human experience. So too is the other common quip that, “pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional,” which implies our goal is to not suffer at all. While we might be able to alleviate suffering by letting go of resistance and attachments, we must also acknowledge that often going directly into suffering can often take us further than trying to avoid it altogether.
There is an intense power in being able to sit with suffering. There are numerous reasons why this is the case. I encourage you to ask yourself how you relate to suffering as we go over some of the reasons to embrace it.
The future reward surpasses the current struggle
One of the biggest reasons we learn to embrace struggle and challenge is that there is a perceived future reward that outweighs the current struggle. This is the main reason people exercise and apply the principle of “no pain, no gain.” They are convinced that overcoming the current challenge will make all future challenges easier.
You have probably heard the old studies into delayed gratification. While recent discoveries have pointed out some flaws in the original research, the main lesson continues to ring true: we often must withstand present discomfort in order to reach that future reward. This is true for much of schooling and education in general. In order to begin practicing medicine, doctors have to struggle for years and years of education and residencies in order to fulfill all the requirements of licensure.
So many of our goals are hard-won. Whether we own a business that has struggled for years before finally becoming profitable, or deal with a child during their “terrible twos” to raise an adult with whom we can have engaging conversations, much of the human experience involves months or years of struggle to get where we want to be.
Often, restricting pleasure in the moment makes the payoff even better. Practitioners of neo-tantra–or sacred sexuality–will stress the importance of restraining and building up an orgasm. In what is sometimes called “stacking,” those engaging in this practice will get very close to orgasms only to back away at the last moment. Practitioners will report that the eventual orgasm will then feel like five or six at once.
In looking at how a current struggle will provide us with a future payoff, we see how almost all future payoffs actually require suffering in order to get there. This is due to a particularity of the human experience: suffering is a source of growth.
Suffering is a source of growth
If you want to gain flexibility in a muscle, you have to stretch it. If you want to get stronger, you have to put the muscle under a certain amount of stress. In other words, to grow the body, we must apply an external force to produce an internal response. This applies not just to our physical bodies but to our mental and emotional lives as well: human beings grow through struggle.
So, if we truly want to grow, we have to face our shadows. We have to go to the places that scare us. That is the only way to heal. The poet and sexual assault survivor Vironika Tugaleva put it this way: “Emotional pain cannot kill you, but running from it can. Allow. Embrace. Let yourself feel. Let yourself heal.”
People who are dedicated to growth are dedicated to struggle. This shift in consciousness no longer looks at the world through the lens of “good” and “bad,” instead it sees everything as grist for the mill. Carlos Castaneda put it wonderfully when he wrote, “The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man takes everything as either a blessing or a curse.”
Because growth requires struggle, that means our capacity to grow is directly tied to our capacity to face suffering. This especially applies to growing our compassion. Our ability to be compassionate, both to others and ourselves, is directly tied to our ability to be with suffering. To be compassionate, we must be able to sit with the suffering.
This applies not just on a personal level, but on a global one as well. Humanity is facing unprecedented challenges right now. A warming planet. Political divides. War in Ukraine. Threats to women’s rights. Late-stage capitalism perpetuating poverty and inequality. It would be naïve, however, to think that any problems we are currently facing are greater than those faced by generations before us. Humanity’s place in the universe has always involved struggling against a universe that seems largely indifferent to our survival, and one of fighting each other through endless wars and conflict.
If we are to solve any problem, we must have the courage to face it, especially when it comes to injustices. The biggest impediments to justice in the world are those that claim injustice doesn’t exist. Those who deny its existence are actually exacerbating suffering and making the situation worse, which is why every activist from Gandhi to Nelson Mandela to Martin Luther King Jr. have noted that the real impediments to progress are those that stand on the sidelines to oppression.
In this way, acknowledging and being with suffering is not a path to complacency. Rather, once we accept suffering, it becomes a catalyst for action. For peace. For justice. For protecting the most marginalized people in the world.
Being with suffering is not just a catalyst for external revolution, but an internal one as well. This is just another reason to welcome suffering into your life: it will awaken something incredible inside of you.
Intense suffering awakens something deep within us
While I wouldn’t wish intense suffering on anyone, the times in our lives of intense suffering often end up being a necessary wake-up call. Those who have a brush with cancer often report a renewed perspective on life. Those that lose a loved one are reminded of the preciousness of life. Intense suffering, in both ourselves and others, has the capacity to awaken something deep and beautiful inside all of us.
It was the poet Rupi Kaur who wrote:
i am not a victim of my life
what I went through
pulled a warrior out of me
and it is my greatest honor to be her
This path is known as the path of the wounded healer, where our unique challenges end up being a source of empathy, compassion, and understanding. Often, those who have gone through a “dark night of the soul” end up leading others out of the same situation. Former drug addicts help others break free of their addictions. Sexual assault survivors become therapists and help others recover from trauma. Former convicts create boys groups to keep young men out of the criminal justice system. It becomes a lot easier to empathize with and understand someone’s experience when you have gone through it yourself.
And sometimes, when the suffering we experience becomes so extreme, it turns into something else entirely: a rite of passage. Rites of passage are almost ubiquitous across all cultures, as participants undergo extreme feats of endurance in order to attain new levels of consciousness.
Perhaps one of the biggest examples of pain as a rite of passage involves the bullet ant mittens of the Sateré-Mawé people of Brazil. The name “bullet ant” comes from the fact that being bitten by just one of these ants is so ungodly painful that it is akin to being shot by a bullet. The Mawé people believe that any boy who wants to become a man must experience the worst pain the jungle has to offer by sticking their arm inside the glove. As Gabe Paoletti reports,
For their manhood ritual, the Mawé submerge hundreds of bullet ants in a natural sedative, rendering them unconscious. These large ants are then woven into gloves made of leaves, with their stingers pointing towards the inside of the glove . . . The boy must then keep the gloves on his hand for a full five minutes, while the hundreds of ants repeatedly sting him.
The bullet ant glove is then removed, but the boy will likely be in pain and shake uncontrollably for hours. He may even experience muscle paralysis, disorientation, and hallucinations.
These kinds of rites of passage might involve days of fasting or lonely vision quests in the jungle or desert. In the Lakota Sun Dance, for example, participants will dance around a pole while staring into the hot sun with hooks in their chest. Only once they become so exhausted that they cannot go any further, they collapse, and the weight of their own bodies tears the hooks from their muscles. In this way, something dies, and something new is born.
While some of these exercises might be thought of simply as “tests” of someone’s fortitude, more often, they awaken something deep inside the participant. When you think you can’t go on and when the mind and heart fully reach their limits, something else awakens inside. You might call it God, soul, or spirit. It was Thomas Merton who wrote, “Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.”
These rituals are almost always carried out in a spiritual or religious context, and that is for a good reason: the meeting of pain and suffering is a deeply spiritual practice.
Spiritual discipline
One of my absolute favorite Sanskrit words is tapas. And, no, tapas does not mean a small plate of delicious Spanish food. Tapas is a deep philosophical concept that can be particularly found in the yogic tradition. It is most often translated as “discipline” or “gumption,” but there are much deeper meanings to this word.
Two more ways to translate tapas is “the removal of impurities” and “fire.” The idea is that, just as when you put raw clay into a kiln to create the pot or raw metal into a fire to burn everything else away, so too do we put ourselves through intense spiritual practice in order to burn away impurities. In this way, suffering is seen as purifying–a way to take one step closer to God.
So, the power of being with suffering takes you deep, and the concept of tapas is so important that I will save its further exploration for its own blog post.
How do you relate to suffering? Let me know in the comments below.
