Suffering is Optional!

It's the middle of the night. I can't sleep to save my life. I'm utterly miserable -- this lousy night had to go! I just wanted it to end. I begged by brain to let go and let me drift away.  My emotions were roller-coasting like crazy. Up and down, crazy one moment and calm the next, I was making myself nuts! My brain wouldn't turn off and it was all sour with negative thoughts, critical and complaining, running the same things over and over again, in endless varieties of "oh poor me." I kept catching myself at it, but the emotions were too bright and I'd slip down into the negative cycle of sour thoughts again and again. Finally, finally, I fell asleep. 

The following morning, which came WAY too early, I felt myself getting grumpy. I watched myself creating grumpiness. Becoming aware of my grumpy thoughts, as thoughts, helped me put an end to them right away. I was NOT going to spend the day the way I'd spent the night. I pondered this experience, and this is what I realized:

There are two kinds of suffering: physical suffering and emotional/spiritual suffering. All suffering is an interpretation made by the mind. It is the mind’s response to ongoing pain of any kind. Thus physical suffering is the mind’s response to some form of unpleasant physical sensation. Said another way, suffering is the mind’s interpretation of ongoing physical pain; it is turning a genuine sensation into an thought and then thinking that thought over and over again. Likewise, emotio-spiritual suffering is the mind’s response, the mind’s interpretation of ongoing emotional or spiritual pain. All suffering, therefore, occurs only in the mind. Suffering is a thought that arises. This is why enlightenment is an end to suffering, but not an end to pain. The enlightened mind simply stops attaching the thought of suffering to the event of pain.

The enlightened mind experiences pain as it arises, experiences pain while it is present, and experiences the absence of pain when pain dissipates back into the Ground Of Being from which it and all else arises. The Ground Of Being is, of course, formless awareness.

In the spirit of giving you an opportunity to practice rejecting the thought of suffering, I'm going to share the rest of this little essay:

We don’t have to wait until we are enlightened to realize that suffering is nothing more than a

thought in the mind, a puff of fluff blowing in the wind. A thought has no more life or substance than we pump into it by attaching to it. By attaching, I mean the amount of attention we give to the thought; I mean how often we think that particular thought, how long we hold it in our minds. Left alone, any thought will arise and dissipate almost instantaneously.

Thoughts linger only when we pay attention to them. Thoughts are faces in a crowd, frantically jumping up and down, waving their arms about, shouting and otherwise carrying on, hoping to be noticed. Or perhaps more accurately, a thought is a contestant on American Idol: it marches onto the stage of our mind, singing its little heart out, hoping desperately to be picked for the show. If our thought-contestant is shot down by the Simon in our mind, then it disappears. When the thought-contestant disappears it is either gone forever, or if it is a particularly determined type of thought, it might slip around to the back of the line (or even cut back in front of the line) and wait for its chance to get back on the stage in front of the judges and from there to prance about in the show of our lives.

To return to the point, since suffering is nothing more than a contestant, like all the other contestants vying for attention, we can chose to reject its application to appear in the show of our lives. When we do, we experience the emotions or sensations of the moment, and then we let them go and get on with the business of being happy, optimistic, lovely and wonderful.
It is similar with emotions: left to themselves, emotions also dissipate quickly. Not as quickly as thoughts, but quickly nevertheless. Also like thoughts, emotions can be recreated, or prolonged, by feeding them the lovely attention they crave, the attention they need to live on. We can literally stew in emotion for years. For instance, we can hold on to and recreating anger or hurt, over and over and over until we self-identify with them, until we hire our anger or hurt and they become permanent actors on the stage of our lives. That sounds yucky. Let’s not do that. Let’s go back to the happy, happy, joyful, peaceful, lovely, wonderful and wise beings that we all are and fire the thought of suffering from the cast!