Pain x Avoidance = Suffering
I loathe the saying ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’. Loathe it. If anyone has said this to you straight after surviving a traumatic event you know that it’s of no comfort. In those raw moments (or months) you are left feeling anything but ‘strong’. Keep your perspectives to yourself, unless your name is Hannah Gadsby. In her Netflix Comedy Special, Gadsby says:
‘There is nothing is stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself’.
Truth.
The excruciating work of rebuilding your obliterated sense of self with whatever shred of strength you have left, does indeed make you stronger. It makes you fierce. However, maintaining a pulse after a crushing event is not the same as resurrecting yourself physically, mentally or spiritually, the two states are worlds apart. So take what I am about to say with a grain of salt. I’m not telling you to make light of your pain and just move on. On the contrary, be with your pain, live your pain, and respect your pain. For as long as you need to.
Have you heard the story about the girl who helped the butterfly shed its cocoon? She assisted by peeling away the cocoon walls that the butterfly would have struggled against for days. In doing so the girl robbed the butterfly of the struggle it needed to grow strong enough to fly out, without the struggle it emerged weak and frail and died soon after. This story illustrates how we mustn’t avoid pain, firstly because it’s there to makes us stronger, and secondly, when we do it turns into a whole other monster called suffering.
I’d heard it in the yoga teachings, ‘pain is inevitable but suffering is a choice’ and sometimes put the other way ‘suffering is inevitable but pain is not’. It sounded just like another thing annoying spiritual people say. Then it finally clicked for me when I re-read Kristin Neff’s must read and re-read book ‘Self Compassion’. She explained it something like this: pain is anything that feels bad, physical pain or emotional embarrassment, loneliness, jealousy or even anger. The pain is there to serve the purpose of releasing those feelings. You cannot let go of anger until it’s been felt. But what most of us do is feel the fear or the discomfort coming on and judge ourselves immediately for having such feelings. ‘I SHOULD be grateful’. ‘I SHOULD be happy for them’. ‘I SHOULD be more confident’. We should all over ourselves. All we’re doing is making ourselves wrong and avoiding our perfectly human pain.
Avoidance can look like anything from chanting positive affirmations, numbing out with your poison of choice, it can look like procrastination, total distraction, physical discomfort, sickness, irritation, fatigue, excuses, bargaining, anything. You’ll know it by the gut feeling that tells you, whatever you’re cramming in isn’t touching the sides of your real hunger. It’s not hitting the spot, It’s not what you really need right now, because you need to feel to heal. You need to acknowledge your feelings no matter how wrong you think they are. Just saying ‘I’m really nervous’ or ‘I feel alone right now’ (to yourself) can be the recognition that your pain needs to be released and dissolved.
It’s when we keep looking outside of ourselves to distract us from our pain that the suffering begins. Suffering is a pain greater than discomfort and more consuming then dis-ease. When we refuse to acknowledge the pain we give up our power to release it, we become helpless to the suffering. Helplessly stuck in a fog of discontent, longing for it to be over but unable to escape. Suffering is the loud knocking of jilted pain that says ‘you can’t hide from me, I’m coming in whether you like it or not, deal with me!’ Like everything in life pain will catch up with you.
The system will break you, people will betray you, and technology will fail you. Psychological pain is inevitable. It’s just the way it is, Murphy’s Law. But suffering isn’t; you have a choice there, if you’re awake enough to see it. Just like the red flags I spoke about in ‘Body Talk’ be aware of your avoidance red flags, and ask yourself, how do you really feel? Possibly the greatest psychological pain of all is fear, we love love and fear fear. Perhaps it’s phrases like ‘don’t be a scaredy cat’ that make us think being fearful is a weakness. ‘He’s fearless’ is the badge of bravery that we strive for. But fear is a pain that we all have, it’s the reason we are still alive, and the reason we’re not psychopaths.
Pain is a central part of many traditional cultures. When girls become women and boys to men, they are often initiated with rather painful rites of passage to be become stronger members of the tribe. While in western culture we celebrate success, convenience and instant gratification. Pain and failure are far too uncomfortable to be acceptable. Only when failure is followed by a bigger success does it seem to enter the social consciousness. ‘From bankruptcy to multi million dollars!’ read the headlines (that’s tokenistic failure tolerance by the way). Let’s turn our heads back to the east. In martial arts the first thing that students learn is how to fall safely, because falling is inevitable, falling happens a lot when you are learning. No one denies it, and once they’re prepared no student has to fear it.
I didn’t understand the worried hovering of helicopter parenting until I had to train my first staff members. I found myself doing everything for them to shelter them from the pain of making mistakes; I didn’t want them to feel overwhelmed or embarrassed. When really it was those mistakes that would have taught them more than I could have ever explained. Trial and error baby. Instead of teaching them to fail safely, how to dust themselves off and get back on the matt, when we shield and rob others of painful experiences we are telling them that they are not strong or resilient enough, we are teaching them to avoid pain.
Just to contradict myself a little, suffering also has a place. While suffering can be avoided if you stop avoiding pain – suffering, like pain, serves the purpose of helping us grow. My seventy-year-old yoga teacher (you know he’s wise) puts it this way: ‘pain creates strength, struggle creates discipline and suffering creates compassion’.
When you’re unconscious of your pain, perhaps because you’re being manipulated either by a person or the media, or the reality of your pain is too horrible to face, you have no choice but to suffer. I can only understand this because I have experienced it. Feeling the agony of true suffering, the physical pull on the heartstrings, connects you with your humanity, and greater humanity. Reminding yourself that you are human and that we are all in this messy existence together is humbling medicine. Your body knows that. And there is something beautiful about its twisted brilliance.
So welcome to your initiation my friend, which in the west looks like a series of stressful jobs, mean bosses, bad relationships, nasty breakups, money woes, car breakdowns, skin breakouts, addiction, disconnection, societal pressures, disappointments, guilt and oh SO much fear. It’s going to hurt like hell. You don’t have to pretend to love the struggle, but you do need to trust your wings to fly.
It’s going to be okay.
Your Friend,
ps. how great is the Princess Bride?