Pain Is Inevitable, Suffering Is Optional: Embrace Reality to End Suffering

I have two sentences for you. Taken together, they may change everything.

First sentence: Pain is mandatory, suffering is optional.

Second sentence: there is no suffering without resistance.

So let's break that down. Pain comes with the territory of being a human being. It just is. There's not a single one of us who hasn't experienced pain. Cut your finger, your loved one dies, you break up with a sweetheart, you lose an opportunity at work. There's pain associated with that.

The suffering comes in after the pain, in response to the pain.

What's the nature of this suffering? Well, that's the second sentence, “there is no suffering without resistance.”

So it's our resistance to the pain that is the second bite, as the Buddhists say. It's enough to be bitten once by pain. Learn how to not suffer by learning how to not resist.

Yield to reality.

When we yield to reality, we open up the possibility of not suffering.

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