Suffering is Optional, Pain is Not

photo credit: Kim Mar­ius Flakstad

I am not in denial of the hard­ships of life. I know that life hap­pens the way it does! After all, every thought that has ever been thought is “made flesh” on our planet, includ­ing mur­der, rape, dis­ease, all of it. I am not blind to these things. But I under­stand that our suf­fer­ing is gen­er­ated in the mind FIRST.

There is a dif­fer­ence between pain and suf­fer­ing. I can expe­ri­ence pain and yet not suf­fer. Pan­dora, a horse with a crit­i­cal allergy to grass is a great exam­ple of the dif­fer­ence between pain & suf­fer­ing. She has a life threat­en­ing skin allergy yet I do not see suf­fer­ing when I look at her.

The dif­fer­ence is this, pain is a con­se­quence of some­thing we expe­ri­ence, but whether or not we suf­fer is up to us and how we frame that expe­ri­ence in our minds. It’s our think­ing that causes our suffering.

If Pan­dora was wrought up in thoughts about how sad and bad her con­di­tion was, she WOULD suf­fer just like we do when we cre­ate sto­ries in our minds about how bad some­thing is. But Pan­dora is a great exam­ple of some­one who is not attached to a painful story about her con­di­tion or the con­di­tion of the world. It is our thoughts about the world that causes our suffering!

Vic­tim­hood is a diag­nos­able and wide-spread state of con­scious­ness that has us see­ing our­selves as being at the mercy of a dan­ger­ous world. It is not what we expe­ri­ence in life BUT what we do with that expe­ri­ence inside our own mind, what we think & decide about it that deter­mines our degree of suffering.

photo credit: ssken­nel