Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional

Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional…Do you think this is non-sense? Did your brain immediately neglect this fact? Give it a shot. Read it again. Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Suffering is your own choice.

How come?

Yes, the pain, emotional or physical, can be hard. Can influence your daily life, your routine or it can make you feel your world is ruined. How many times did it happen to you that even the painful event is over, the pain itself is over, but you keep coming back to it in your mind? You repeat the situation in your head, you experience all sensations – sweating, fear, panic, anxiety?

Sometimes you even clearly feel the pain in your body.

Every time you repeat, over and over events that passed, the time when you heard some difficult news or you experienced some pain, you retraumatize yourself. You literally let your mind and body go through it not once, but 100 times and the damage and the intensity of the pain is every time the same.

Do you see how self un-love this is?

Choosing to suffer

“Choosing to suffer” doesn’t mean you concisely choose it. It means that as a response to difficult events and the pain in your childhood you build your own system of fighting as you didn’t have the capacity to build a different one. At that time, you didn’t second guess it and you took it as the only way of survival. Today you live up to these systems you built back then and you don’t even notice it because it’s an automatic process in yourself.

But it’s just a process! Today, you are a grown-up. You can change your habits of handling difficult events! You can stop your mind from giving you the worst-case scenarios. You can change your way of thinking.

You still might not have the capacity for doing it but you can take time to learn and build your capacity. It can take an incredible amount of practice, sweat, tears, but it’s changeable. And definitely worth it. It can change your life entirely as it will allow you to live freely.

So, are you ready to do it? Or do you prefer living in the old way, just because it’s a known process, yet, comfortable?

The avoidance of suffering is still suffering

On the other side, there is also avoidance of feelings. Are you one of those that negate life and fill yourself with tons of other problems to solve? Do you allow yourself to feel these emotions, whatever they are? Do you run away from pain and painful events and use this pattern as a way of protection?

Guess what, this pattern doesn’t solve the actual problem either. This pattern is just running away from the problem. If you don’t allow yourself to feel your emotions now, they will hunt you down later. And once they appear again if you avoid them later again and again and again, they rise and they are still hunting you. As a consequence, you live a life of avoidance of painful events and the same problem arises in different parts of your life. In many cases, as a result, your emotions develop a serious disease. In many cases, even then you don’t see them.

Avoidance is also suffering, just in different ways.

To let yourself overcome difficult moments, you have to give yourself permission to feel whatever you feel.
Why do you live a life full of avoidance? Why you don’t want to face your emotions? What are you afraid of?

It will be difficult, but it won’t eat you.

Avoiding, on the other side, will.

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