There is a huge but subtle difference between Pain and Suffering. The pain is real and physical, suffering is controllable by us.
Pain is a sensory experience. If I fall and fracture my knee, I naturally feel physical pain.
Suffering, on the other hand, is a mental choice, that serves only to prolong the pain.
So in the event of a sprained ankle, not accepting what happened, misjudging what happened to us.
I know, this difference is decisive.
When someone dies, when our partner leaves us, when we lose our job or when things do not go our way, the pain is natural, but the suffering that can last for years, we create. What I mean is that there is a connection between pain, physical pain and psychological pain. Not accepting that our relationship has ended, misjudging the neighbor’s behavior, constantly rethinking how everything could have been different only if you had acted differently, brings unnecessary suffering.
Suffering is caused by the rejection of reality. Suffering is the difference between how things are and how you want them to be. Specifically, the attachment to how they should be makes us suffer ourselves.
I am convinced that, as a couple, we must not cheat, when our partner cheats on us, we will inevitably suffer. The event itself has no other meaning than what you attribute to it. It’s not your partner’s behavior that makes you suffer, but judging what he did makes you feel bad. We must not confuse cause with effect. If we start to be more careful, it can be seen that not everyone reacts in the same way to the same event. We never interact with an objective world, but with our subjective interpretation of the world.
If in our culture we have been taught to mourn the death of someone, then we will react to the death of one of us. However, in some cultures, death is celebrated. Therefore, it does not bring in itself suffering, but the interpretation we offer to this event that makes us suffer.
Think of the suffering of a mother who has to give birth, and the suffering of a boy beaten by some of the aggressors in the class. The mother knows that she has to go through pain to give birth to a new life. The boy, on the other hand, is in a state of total rejection, so he suffers both during the experience and in the following days, get angry about what happened. I do not accept the violence of the aggressors, I say that there is a big difference between pain and suffering and that, while the pain is suffering, we create it.
Another bad strategy that brings us more pain is internal dialogue.
It is difficult for us to stop the noise of the mind, because we think it is useful to always repeat the same scenes, the same sentences, ignoring the fact that this activity is totally mechanical, which is not wanted by us, but only by us to present it. We must understand that this thinking about what happened is absolutely useless. Repeating what our partner told us when he left us, we live in joy. It is not eloquent in eleven while our neighbor has brought us out of suffering. We harass each other, paying attention to a noise in our mind that drains our energy and makes us worry unnecessarily. Only by understanding the futility of these actions can we commit ourselves to no longer giving importance.
Indeed, everything that happens to us is there to help us take the next step in our evolution.
We suffer because we are identified with our minds.
Happy people have made Gratitude a daily habit. Sad people, on the other hand, have complained about their favorite sport.
Your outer world is a reflection of your inner world. Each of us creates our own reality. By changing inside, the outside is forced to change.
Learning to be grateful and happy in advance, that is, before we have proof that something good is about to happen, leads to the reality of events for which we can be grateful and happy in retrospect. The more grateful you are, the more events you will be grateful of.