Could our suffering be the result of how we react to our pain/discomfort rather than the pain itself? I believe so.
And if that is the case, then even when the symptoms are horrendous, our actual suffering would remain bearable if we surrendered instead of resisting.
It has been said many times in many different ways that adding second fear is the cause of us going into the downward spiral of anxiety and panic. There are an almost infinite number of things that can trigger this reaction, but it is always something that we fear. It is also something that causes us physical pain/discomfort, emotional pain/discomfort, or both. We tend to think that this triggering pain/discomfort is unbearable, so we fight it, and we suffer.
My experience however is that any level of pain/discomfort, whether emotional, physical (or both), can be faced and accepted, and that it’s how much we struggle and fight against it that determines the intensity of our suffering, and whether it is bearable or unbearable.
This is an important distinction to keep in mind when we are in a setback or period of high anxiety. It means that while we cannot do anything about the anxiety itself, we can determine how we respond to the thoughts and symptoms. By accepting and allowing them, our suffering becomes very bearable, even though the anxiety itself may remain intense.
This applies to the emotional pain of our thoughts and feelings, as well as the pain and discomfort of our physical symptoms.
The Power of Acceptance
I’ll give a personal practical example to illustrate how acceptance can mitigate physical pain. (Trigger alert: Those that are squeamish or may be triggered by description of physical injury, you may want to skip this paragraph). Last November I had a serious injury. Suffice to say, I fell off a ladder and fractured and dislocated my shoulder. It was over an hour before I was sedated and treated in hospital, including a bumpy car ride to emergency.
I have never experienced any pain close to the intensity of this injury. But for the entire hour+, I took each second as it came and breathed and surrendered, breathed and surrendered (not unlike the Lamarze method for childbirth). The pain was excruciating and got worse and worse, but I just faced it and accepted as best I could. And you know, despite the pain, I didn’t feel like I was suffering. I was lucid, I talked to the person who drove me, to reception, the nurses in triage, the X-ray technician, the doctor. I left the hospital and went home only an hour after being admitted.
Aside from the morphine they gave me before resetting the shoulder, I didn’t take as much as an aspirin for the pain, despite the fact I was in a lot of pain and discomfort in the days and weeks that followed. I wasn’t being heroic or stubborn, I simply preferred to feel it all, face it all and surrender to it all. And because I did that, I didn’t need painkillers. The Acceptance Method was sufficient.
If I ever needed proof of the power of this method, I had a huge amount right there. I know too that if I can do this for such intense physical pain, I can do it for similarly intense emotional pain too.
The Takeaway
We only suffer if we are fighting the pain. When we stop struggling, we stop suffering.
