I’ve chosen the idea to embrace suffering and live a life of joy as today’s topic based on recent reading in Thich Nhat Hanh’s book The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation. Here’s the excerpt:
“The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy. When one tree in the garden is sick, you have to care for it. But don’t overlook all the healthy trees. Even while you have pain in your heart, you can enjoy the many wonders of life — the beautiful sunset, the smile of a child, the many flowers and trees. To suffer is not enough. Please don’t be imprisoned by your suffering.”
Hahn, Thich Nhat. The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming Suffering Into Peace, Joy and Liberation. Rider. 1999
Suffering is not your enemy; rather, it’s the beginning of wisdom. It’s the soil in which the tree can sprout and grow.
As you embrace suffering, you’ll begin to notice that your life transforms, not due to the lack of pain but because you learn and choose to rise above it. You start to see that life is full of suffering. It can be found anywhere you look.
What, then, should you give in to it? Should you allow suffering to bury you into a place of complacency and victimhood? Absolutely not!
You decide to let go of your stranglehold on it and allow it to move through you as you yourself move into a state of equanimity.
Thich Nhat Hanh also said,
“Without mud, no lotus.”
– Thich Nhat Hanh
You can’t have something beautiful without pain.
Beauty Born Through the Fire of Suffering and Pain
All it takes is to look at a smiling, jubilant child, and your heart feels lighter. Or a baby quietly sleeping to feel at peace within your soul, even momentarily. Yet this child was born into the world through pain and suffering, a fire that only half of our population can even comprehend.
The wonders of the world and the very structure of our current society were built on suffering. The world we live in was forged through the fire of suffering: brutality, pain, war, torture, and survival of the fittest in all its effervescent forms.
You — sitting in your comfy chair or at the coffee shop, standing in line for a bus, riding in a taxi, flying on an airplane, lying in bed, on the bench at the park, eating at a restaurant, or in any number of places, using technology that gives you access to the entire world in the literal palm of your hand — you are doing so at the expense of massive suffering, carried like a weighted load on the backs of pilgrims, pioneers, war-mongers, peasants, slaves, titans of industry, enraged kings, and broken people: impaled by sword or spear, shot down with bullets and arrows, drowned in rivers or bleeding out on fields of battle — fighting and striving for a better, deeper, more prosperous life, starving in the wilderness as they pushed civilization further and further, all for the sake of finding meaning and purpose, peace and prosperity, hope, power, and glory — or to build a nation or legacy that outshines all others — all through an insurmountable amount of suffering, hardship, and toil.
You suffer your inconvenience. They suffered pain, sorrow, and bloodshed, not for comfort, but for something greater.
Embracing Suffering vs. Glorifying Pain
The above isn’t to say you glorify pain as a means to a more fulfilling life; rather, you use it to transform your life for the better.
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is inevitable.
For most, suffering is built on broken dreams, harsh words, entitlement, fears, and feeling unheard or unseen, among countless other wounds we quietly carry.
One day, if you’re lucky enough to say goodbye, you’ll hold the hand of someone you love for the last time, smiling through tears as they drift into eternal sleep.
Many times, the announcement comes as a shock, gripping you tightly around the neck as you reel from the news, heart pounding, mind numb, disbelief on full display as it turns to grief.
And grieve you must!
Through all of this, you must grieve. You must grieve the harsh words and fears in all their various forms. There must come a time when you grieve your broken dreams and feelings of being unheard or unseen.
You must grieve all these things—fully and fiercely—because that’s what it means to be human.
And then let go.
Release it like a raging river pummeling down the mountainside, and once it has passed, you’ll find a peaceful flowing river waiting below.
I like this passage from the Tao Te Ching:
“If you want to become whole, let yourself be partial. If you want to become straight, let yourself be crooked. If you want to become full, let yourself be empty…”
– Tao Te Ching
Your purpose in life isn’t to avoid suffering; it’s to ascend through it to find the beautiful light shining down on you as if you’ve climbed up a mountain through a thunderstorm to experience the warm sun at the summit.
Embrace Suffering as a Teacher, Not a Curse
Your suffering, whatever it may be, is not a curse. It may feel that way. You may be shaking your fists at the sky in anger and frustration, with tears streaming down your face as you search for the answer to your plight.
Situations may feel like they’re beating you down. People might have taken advantage of you or hurt you very, very deeply. You might have been in a situation that was out of your control, experiencing something no person should have to experience, and as such, you feel that life is a curse rather than a blessing.
However, holding onto your suffering this way prevents you from reaching the freedom waiting just beyond.
Seneca said:
“No man is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself.”
– Seneca
This is your moment to rise, to hold your head up high, and refuse to keep playing the victim to your suffering.
Understand this moment isn’t necessarily easy. Sometimes, the pain has become so normal that letting it go can be challenging.
But you must let go if you hope to experience a life of freedom — one rooted in joy, peace, love, gratitude, and generosity.
When you allow yourself to let go, you begin to see that each lesson learned in the darkness through hardship and pain will shine brightest in the light.
The Apostle Paul stated in Romans:
“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.”
– Romans 8:18
Paul was speaking of an eternal glory, but there is a glory here and now just waiting to be revealed in you.
Embrace Suffering by Living Fully in the Present
The present moment contains all the peace and joy you will ever need. It happens one second at a time, and to become one with the present is to become one with life. As you do so, you begin to realize that suffering is a part of life, allowing you to let go of your preconceived ideas of what suffering is.
When you embrace the present moment while looking at the person treating you poorly, your perspective changes. It’s as if you can look past their inexcusable actions to see the deeper life hiding below the surface.
What you’ll find is another soul silently suffering, shaped by wounds and mistreatments of their own, as they struggle to make sense of this life and their place in it.
It’s hard to see this in someone else if you haven’t taken the time to embrace suffering yourself. Usually, this is because you are basing the experience on the past pain you feel mixed with the current unpleasant situation.
However, doing so limits your perspective of the present experience, which is akin to putting blinders over your eyes, attempting to shield yourself with hope, but missing the truth unfolding in front of you.
Don’t Wait to be Whole Before You Live
If you wait to experience healing, however that may look to you, before you allow yourself to live, then you will one day look back with a certain amount of regret and an ache in your heart over the time you spent waiting to feel whole.
Life doesn’t wait for your healing to begin, and it’s up to you to choose to live fully or not. This is why it’s essential to embrace suffering now, to accept what is as it comes to you, wholeheartedly, without deflection.
Marcus Aurelius said:
“Accept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny, for what could more aptly fit your needs?”
– Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
There’s a great passage in Ecclesiastes that goes along with this idea and is as follows:
“A good name is better than precious ointment, and the day of death than the day of one’s birth. Better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for that is the end of all men; and the living will take it to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter, for by a sad countenance, the heart is made better. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise than for a man to hear the song of fools.”
– Ecclesiastes 7:1-4
When you can embrace suffering and accept your fate, you sit in the house of mourning. You allow yourself to come to terms with all that life is and your eventual demise.
And yet, it lifts your spirits because, after all, living is simply the slow, agonizing descent towards old age and death, but when you’ve come to terms with dying, life becomes something to truly live for — not fear.
Embrace Suffering with Compassion, Not Judgment
“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”
– Mother Teresa
The same goes for judging yourself.
If you’re busy judging yourself, you have no time to love yourself.
Stop judging yourself for your insecurities, weaknesses, anger, and frustration with yourself, life, and others. Stop judging yourself for not living up to the potential you feel inside or for the mistakes of your past.
Judging yourself is to cling to suffering. It means holding onto and reliving the event, thoughts, and emotions in a self-perpetuating cycle.
Letting go of judgment means learning to embrace suffering with compassion. This may be difficult because nobody knows you the way you do, and your faults may be on full display within your mind.
But that’s just it; your mind is not only where the judgment takes place, it’s also where suffering takes place.
Most people today do not suffer their circumstances; they suffer their own minds.
Your suffering is constructed in the mind and reinforced through repetition and feeling. It’s dwelling on the issues, whether perceived or real, that you go through regularly that causes you to experience your current version of reality.
You could take a pair of siblings, both dealing with an abusive parent, and each of them will generate a different reality based on their own individual conceptions of their upbringing.
One may become successful and do well in life while the other struggles to make ends meet.
One may generate healthy relationships that turn the tide in the former parenting dynamics they experienced, while the other continues down the path of abuse because they couldn’t figure out how to release their grip on the suffering they endured.
Stop Blaming Yourself for Being in Pain
Growth is a byproduct of pain. Without pain, there is no growth. Pain could be physical, mental, or emotional, or it could be the swift passage of time before you realize the work you set out to accomplish.
Pain is a fundamental part of life, whether we want to accept it or not. No one skips through life without experiencing pain, which is why it’s essential to embrace suffering continually.
Think of it like this: Trees don’t grow out of thin air. Instead, you have to plant them in the dirt, and the sprout must fight its way up to the surface and force its roots down through the dirt in order to grow and develop into what we know as a tree. It’s hard work and takes time, pressure, and patience. The progress is slow and silent, but eventually, it gets to the point where you can sit and rest in its shade. Birds build nests in its branches, and a whole new ecosystem is born on, around, and in this one tree.
You can also think of it like this: Butterflies don’t get dropped from the backs of fairies. The caterpillar must build a cocoon, and the butterfly must struggle out of the cocoon in order to survive, but the struggle doesn’t end there.
Take monarchs, for example. These frail creatures travel thousands of miles to winter in warmer climates, yet they do so year after year, generation after generation.
If you’ve ever watched a monarch struggle to fly, even in the slightest breeze, it can cause you to wonder how they do it. But when you watch one open its wings to catch an updraft as it slowly circles up, up, and up, so effortlessly, you start to understand that it’s not all about pure strength of will.
It’s about accepting the situation and moving through it with grace.
You Are Not Broken — You Are Growing
You must learn to stop blaming yourself for being in pain and understand that you are not broken; you are growing.
Rather than condemning yourself, speak to yourself like you would to a hurting child, and be willing to comfort yourself when needed.
There may also be days when you need a reality-gripping slap in the face, which grounds you in the essence of what it means to be human. That’s okay.
However, don’t overlook the child within, the one looking for love and acceptance, the expression of the soft emotional core of who you truly are.
You also have to remember that joy and sorrow are not merely opposites; they coexist within the same heart.
When you can hold your suffering lightly, you begin to find freedom. Peace doesn’t come from attempting to escape pain but from walking through it with awareness and acceptance.
Embrace Suffering and Choose Joy Anyway
Don’t keep shoveling happiness into the corner until life is perfect or until you overcome the pain that has taken root in your mind. Begin to practice happiness regardless of what you’re going through.
Take time to sit with your suffering and enjoy a sunset, or marvel at the birds as they fly overhead. Allow yourself to find beauty without denying your grief or pain.
To be alive is to feel. It’s to accept whatever comes your way in a state of equanimity without judgment for the moment. Understand that you are not imprisoned by suffering unless you believe that to be the case.
Peter Crone has a great quote that goes like this:
“People go through life as prisoners of their own mind. The only prison anyone lives in is their own perspective, their own point of view.”
– Peter Crone
If this is true, which I believe it to be, then you can choose to change your perspective. You can choose joy despite your present or past experiences.
Instead of running from it, choose to embrace suffering.
Thank you for reading. If you found this message insightful, please share it with someone else who needs to hear it.
I hope you have a great day!
Josiah
