Yeah, but…
“Pain will always be a part of the human journey it’s a natural and spontaneous reaction to what happens. If I hit my finger with a hammer, it will hurt. If I lose a loved one, I will feel grief. No amount of awakening, enlightenment, transformation or spirituality will ever change this. Pain is inevitable. If you are alive, you will experience pain. Pain plays a good, useful and protectionary function. For example, you would want to know that the frying pan handle is hot before your skin started charring. Pain warns us of dangerous situations. Pain also motivates us to change. For example, experiencing the pain of an unhealthy relationship motivates us to seek counseling or leave the relationship if that is what is necessary.
Suffering, however, is the result of how we interpret or understand pain, or our inability to let go of it. Suffering is what we add onto our physical pain, illness, grief, or loss. It is the commentary and judgment we place on ourselves and life. Suffering often takes the form of unhappiness, anguish, fear, emptiness, lack of peace, dissatisfaction, bitterness, loneliness, misery, dis-ease, restlessness, disappointment, stress, addiction, codependency, etc…
You cannot escape the reality of human pain. Though there are ways you can lessen or postpone it, like practicing habits of good health to lower your risk of disease, you still will have sickness and other forms of pain. You can’t prevent or stop pain in your life and as we just saw, it wouldn’t be advisable to eliminate pain from your life even if you could.
However, you can put an end to your suffering. This is good news, because it’s the suffering (not the pain) that causes your unhappiness and the list of other things mentioned above.
There’s only one approach that will end suffering, which is to say, “I want to end my suffering, whatever the answer may be to end it.”
It can’t be a “Yeah, but….” thing. It can’t be:
“I want to end my suffering but…
it must be comfortable,
it must be something that fits into what I already know,
it must be understandable to my mind,
it must abide by my conditions.”
That will never work. It must be an unconditional and unqualified commitment – “I want to end my suffering, whatever the answer may be to end it.”
Even now your mind/ego feels threatened and is pushing back by saying, “Yeah, but what if ending my suffering means killing or harming people? If I applied that logic I might go out and murder people.” It’s just a smokescreen because your mind/ego doesn’t want to give up control. Jesus referred to a peace not of this world and beyond your knowing. satisfying your mind will not lead to peace or end your suffering.”
- Jim Palmer, Notes from (over) the Edge
