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