“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”
The suffering inherent in living life is as old as the hills. Bad things happen, both big and small. If we’re going to suffer, we might as well try to develop some ways to cope with it and learn as much from our painful experiences as we can. It makes us more human, real and wise. Like rushing whitewater over river rocks, our suffering might pound us but over time it also smooths our jagged places. Suffering can develop us in ways that would be inaccessible to us otherwise.
Because we can’t always change the pain and suffering that life brings, how can we better cope with this reality? How we cope is so important because if we cope in unhealthy ways we risk converting our suffering into longer term emotional problems such as anxiety and depression. Our minds, programmed for survival, are adept at looking for ways out of suffering but there are many things that we cannot escape or change. This is where the ability to cope effectively during difficult times is essential.
When there is no escape
If you’re familiar with laboring during childbirth, perhaps you can remember looking for a way out and wanting to escape the pain. This is how our minds tend work when things get difficult. We dig in and resist. We protest. Irrationally, we wish that reality was not reality. When we wish to be somewhere that we’re not, or wish that things were not as they are, we increase rather than neutralize our suffering. We can all benefit from loosening our grasp on the desire to control our reality or reduce our suffering. Sometimes when we let go, things fall into place. But even when they don’t, letting go is still a helpful practice because it means that we are consciously acknowledging what we can’t control. And the amazing thing about that is that once we acknowledge what we can’t control, it stops controlling us.
It may seem depressing at first to acknowledge that life involves suffering and that we will never escape this fact. But look more deeply and there is more than just the depressing nature of reality. There is opportunity to see things clearly as they are and to develop a new kind of strength and empowerment through the way you respond to the inevitability of suffering. This is the place where big mindfulness muscle is built. This is the rock within that you can rest on when you’re struggling and when life is way less than perfect. And what’s so interesting about this is that, by building this strength and acknowledging how life sometimes is, we can actually suffer less.
When coping with suffering, it can help to remember:
- Nothing is permanent. Try to accept what is, knowing that it won’t last. Things will eventually change. Even when circumstances don’t change, often our feelings about them over time do.
- Suffering is inevitable but creating more suffering for yourself is optional. Have you ever been anxious and then started to worry about being anxious? Or depressed and then gotten more depressed about being depressed because you started thinking about how depressed you were? That’s how we create more suffering for ourselves. So, when you’re suffering, try to make space for the pain and let it be what it is without adding analysis and interpretation about your emotional state which often leads to making it worse rather than better. (You can analyze it later, if you must, when your feelings aren’t so intense.)
- Focus on beauty and joy. Dissatisfaction keeps us suffering. When we’re in pain, it’s hard to find the good. But we can do it in small ways. And by bringing our focus to other things, we can allow our suffering to coexist with other aspects of life that bring us joy even amidst our pain.
