So often we take what could have just been left at “that hurts” and turn it into a self mortifying, shameful, suffering routine. The analogy I commonly use with clients is this:
If you touch your hand to a hot stove and quickly jump away with a “Fuck! That hurt!” - that’s what pain is. Now, if you touch the hot stove and find yourself in a thinking rabbit hole of “This is so painful! Why would I have made that mistake?! How stupid of me!!”, the whole time your skin sizzling because we never removed our hand from the stove - now that’s suffering! Sometimes we fall into the trap of “If I cause myself to suffer, then I will really learn the lesson!”, but I always ask people what about their big beautiful brain do they think will fail them so hard that they would forget the pain and discomfort of this? Can we give ourselves some trust that the pain will be remembered, without having to cause shame and suffering? Can we give ourselves some grace and forgiveness? Or is our energy better being spent through self torture? (she asked sarcastically…). Adding additional meaning, thoughts, and interpretations of a painful situation can turn that pain into suffering.
An old buddhist saying goes: “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.”
If we have uncertainty coming up in life, a challenging upcoming transition, or any other upcoming event that we know will cause discomfort, we can also evaluate how we may be causing our present to be painful instead of waiting for the pain to actually be present. Again I ask, is this how you want to spend your precious energy? Unless you are my dog currently looking over my shoulder reading along as I type, you are a human and maybe that deserves some grace falling into these traps sometimes. But learning to identify and become aware of when we are causing suffering to ourselves will help us more quickly practice allowing pain to just be…. Uncomfortable, but not self-injurious and torturous.
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