The hardest thing we will ever give up is our suffering

“The hardest thing we will ever give up is our suffering.”

I’m reading Chasing Elephants: Healing Psychologically with Buddhist Wisdom by Diane Shainberg, and I’ve been thinking about that sentence since I read it a couple of days ago. A year ago, I would have yelled at this book, “Damn, honey, I’ve been trying to give up my suffering for years. I just can’t find anyone to take it.” Now though, in many ways, I think it’s true.

Things happen in this world – bad things, sometimes bad beyond believing. Loved ones die, sometimes hard and slow. Loved ones kill us, sometimes hard and slow. What with war and racism and inequality and all our interpersonal violence, it seems absurd to think that we are hoarding suffering as if we might run out. And yet, we do. (and by we, I mean me.) All the what ifs, the scripts other people wrote for us that we keep following, the voices in our heads, our constructions of How Things Are Supposed to Be (but Aren’t) – that’s the shit that makes us crazy. That’s the stuff that makes us hear, “You’re a bad person, unloved and unlovable.” every time we hear a criticism, the stuff that makes us go into anxiety overdrive every time things don’t go according to plan, the stuff that makes us beat ourselves up over and over again for being fallible and human. Much of my up and down right now is dictated by events that are long over and the ways I still let that define me. I want some sort of acknowledgment from the Universe that Bad Things Happened, and I’m finding it extraordinarily hard to pry my fingers away from things that cause me pain, but feel like part of my identity.

Obviously, there is a physicality to suffering that can’t be meditated away. Rent is rent, and all the awareness in the world won’t prevent an eviction sidewalk sale if you can’t pay the landlord. Bullets are bullets, and dead is dead, but maybe that is precisely the point: We can’t control what happens. We can only control whether or not we show up and stay present in out lives. I’m not Buddhist, but what Shainberg is talking about puts words around a lot of my experience over the past few years: this idea that if we bear witness to our own pain and that of others without judging it, that if we stay present in this moment, and then in the next one, no matter what we feel, things will shift and change and we will get to a better place. It will take a long damn time, and it may hurt like hell, but it will happen.

"As grief burns our ego, our pride, our idea of how life should be, we empty ourselves of who we thought we were. As love lost tears us open, we fall, and falling we find our inner freedom to be the truth of who we are – the loving, beautiful, powerful vital essence that we learned to hide our whole life since our parents couldn’t give space to its beauty."

And this is what I need someone to say: that when I find my deepest truth, it will not be that I am a sinner. Instead, it’s more like coming home to myself and finding that I was always unstained and okay. Thomas Keating calls it getting past the false self to the true self. Call it awareness, the Source, Christ consciousness, whatever, but it’s all ok.

I think it might be time to let go.

Comments

[John]

Hi, Im from Melbourne.
This reference points out that it is impossible to give up ones suffering, and that all efforts at attempting to do so only reinforce ones suffering.

1. www.dabase.org/dualsens.htm

On the other hand their IS freely Given Divine Grace.

2. www.dabase.org/tfrbklih.htm
3. www.dabase.org/oltawwfm.htm

[Kori]

Wow. Someone told me to read your latest blog posts after she read mine on suffering and I am so glad she did. You are so articulate and I felt like you were speaking to me about my life! Thank you for your writing. I would love to read that book now. Peace to you!

-Kori

p.s. have you let go yet? Let me know when you do because I think I am about ready too:)

[Christy]

Kori -

Glad you liked the post. Sadly, the letting go is not going terribly well - at the moment, it feels like things have a hold on me rather than the other way round. If I ever discover the letting go secret, I will let you know.