If the raft is our metaphor for journeying towards wholeness, then suffering is represented by the storms that meet us on the open ocean of life. Where do we place suffering in our understanding of being whole?
It’s not exactly a fun conversation to have, but I invite you to bear with me for a moment. In many ways, it’s the elephant in the room: something very present and also something we don’t enjoy talking about. Life would be much better without suffering, and yet genuine wholeness includes some kind of relationship with it. It may sound contradictory, but it’s something we have to look at if we’re going to have a full appreciation of what life is, and how we can be a complete part of it.
Once again, we should start with a clear definition of what we’re talking about. When I use the word “suffering”, I’m not just thinking of the worst experiences imaginable. I’m referring to the whole range of human discomfort and difficulty as we experience it in our minds, bodies, hearts, and relationships. Not getting what we want is suffering. Hating someone is suffering. Coming down with the flu is suffering. Whatever we find ourselves challenged by, from the smallest irritation to the worst of the worst, can be included in our definition of suffering. For clarity, then,
Suffering: any experience marked by difficulty, struggle, or dissatisfaction in life.
With that in mind, I think it’s important to acknowledge that we are witnessing the worst of the worst in an unprecedented way right now, which makes this conversation that much more urgent. Whether we’re experiencing it personally or watching it happen to others, our exposure is heightened and increased in a way, I think, we’re being extremely challenged to handle.
To be clear that we’re including the full scope of reality in our conversation, I’ll name a few of many catastrophic current events: Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan, Ethiopia. Refugee crises in Central America, the Mediterranean, and the US/Mexico border. Mass shootings in America. Climate disaster. If you can think of it, it’s a part of this discussion.
This might seem like a huge structure to work with, and your first thought could be: how are these things the same? How is genocide in the same boat as being late to work? Well, they’re not. Including both large and small in the same definition doesn’t mean everything is equal. It just means we’re not leaving anything outside the scope of our awareness. Because the very word “wholeness” implies everything being present, this includes how we can think about suffering.
This is important because we are often exclusive in our attitude, playing what I think of as the “Olympics of suffering”. This pits events and experiences against each other, disagreeing about which is “worse”. An example of this is fighting about whose day was harder in a relationship. With a more inclusive view, we’re not saying experiences are the same, or that complex, critical context shouldn’t be examined. Some fires are clearly hotter than others and those need to be attended to first. But, if we can’t act because we’re too busy arguing over which fire is the biggest or the brightest, then we’ll have a problem that cuts in two ways. To use the example: you’ve had a bad day, and your partner has had a bad day. Does it matter whose was worse, or whether you can take care of each other in the way both of you need? So in daily life and in the face of crisis, we need a wider view to have any hope of momentum.
I’ll given another example from my own life: I currently serve as an Interspiritual-Buddhist chaplain on the spiritual care team at a Level 1 trauma hospital, caring for patients of all backgrounds. In terms of medical injury and crisis, a Level 1 hospital sees the “worst of the worst” cases, and these are the situations I respond to. While my work requires me to go wherever I’m needed, what would happen if I suddenly decided that the neurology ICU was more “important” than the burn unit? That it would be better to spend all day in emergency and ignore calls to the cancer ward? While all situations are obviously not equal, I don’t make preferences of them; and practice holding everything with care and attention. Whether I’m sitting with an anxious wife whose husband is going into an MRI scan, or at the bedside with someone dying, my concern is the same. We can hold our own experiences of suffering in the world in a similar way. In terms of creating meaningful relationships to suffering, playing the Olympics is a dead end.
We can also put this attitude in terms of our body: if we twist our ankle, and then break our arm in the fall, of course we attend to the broken arm first. But that doesn’t mean we ignore the twisted ankle either. When we can, we attend to that too, with the same attention we gave to the broken arm. We’re not withholding care for ourselves because the broken arm is clearly more serious than the ankle. We also don’t sit on the ground debating which is worse!
Whatever it is, whyever it is, we have to accept at a basic level that suffering is happening. This is likely our first and biggest challenge. We’re very good at avoiding it, whether it’s happening to us or other people. It’s hard to accept because, well, it’s hard. It’s genuinely difficult to include the experience, whether we’re worried about our job or coming to terms with something we’ve just seen on the news. Because our first instinct is usually to get away from it, or ignore it hoping it will go away, we often lack the resources to even consider acceptance as a possibility.
Accepting suffering does not mean we’re okay with it. Read that again! Of course we don’t want to suffer, and, at our clearest we recognize we don’t want other people to suffer either. However we or others suffer, we want to do something about it. Acceptance doesn’t mean becoming powerless. It doesn’t mean we’re giving up and surrendering to the situation. It just means we stop resisting the reality of suffering. We drop denial and acknowledge that it’s there.
Denial basically says, “this is so difficult to bear that it’s impossible; so it can’t be happening. I won’t look at it. If I don’t look at it, it isn’t happening.” Again, we do this in small and large ways: and ignorance is definitely not bliss in any situation. The suffering doesn’t go away, in fact it gets worse. The larger the denial, the more entrenched suffering becomes. I see this often in the hospital: whether family member or patient, those who are struggling to accept their situation are often having a harder time than those who relate to that sense of acceptance.
Have you ever asked someone you care about how they’re doing, they say “I’m fine”, and you can tell by their face that they’re clearly not? Even though we do it all the time, we know how painful denial is. We don’t actually want to pretend things are different: we want to be supported and held in our difficulty.
Accepting suffering isn’t a cold, logical conclusion, like 1+1=2. When you shake hands with reality, you have to feel its grip. Especially with the deep wounds of the world, there’s profound emotion in accepting suffering. This can be a difficult experience for us. The heart breaks. You can feel deeply sad, or angry, as if something that shouldn’t have been taken from you was taken away. Even if it’s not happening to you or someone you know, there’s a resonance in the human heart that connects with this hurt. It’s important that we know how to allow this emotion to come forward: some Buddhist traditions refer to this experience as “the genuine heart of sadness”. It’s a necessary step because we’re finally willing to accept what’s happening to us, to others. This can be a very vulnerable and tender thing.
When our heart breaks like this, we think it’s over, that we’re damaged in some permanent way. Instead, what the genuine heart of sadness creates in that breaking is space: space to acknowledge, accept, and embrace suffering’s presence. It’s a heart that is broken open to the world: fully relating to the wholeness of life in its sorrow and wonder.
If we can do this, it’s a big step forward. Unlike denial (which says things are impossible), behind acceptance is the sense that we can do something about our situation. If I thought the possibility of being useful to someone in the trauma unit was impossible, I’d never walk in the room, or even have a job for that matter. I accept their situation because I fundamentally feel that something is workable (even though I don’t know what it is yet). Acceptance is relationship+action: moving towards what’s happening, and through that awareness gaining a sense of what’s possible.
Sometimes, even just relationship is enough. In my role in professional spiritual care, much of my work is grounded in simple things: listening, being a companion, holding someone’s hand. It is true that I can’t fix a permanent injury, or take someone’s emotional pain away: but that doesn’t mean things are a lost cause. Even just witnessing someone’s experience with them can be transformative. Because we are often isolated when we run from suffering, it is meaningful to know that we’re not alone in facing it.
Suffering will always be a part of life. I’m not saying this means it should happen to us, or that we deserve it; absolutely not! Suffering simply is. We need to start there so we can learn how to place it within our journey of wholeness. It’s not always simple, and the willingness to allow things to be complicated is important. We need to be curious and learn about what is causing suffering in order to understand what can be done about it. But as long as we try to lock it away or reject it as a part of our experience, we’ll struggle to show up in life. Fire feeds fire, and resisting suffering tends to create more of it. In order to transform it, then, we cannot add to it. Going through and with it is the way of courage and authentic change.
There is a lot to reflect on here, and I think it’s important to walk lightly with this subject. Again, my sense is that we are exposed to more suffering than we know how to handle at the moment. If we’re not careful, it can both paralyze us and make it difficult to relate to what’s challenging in our own lives. Just like it would be dangerous for me to assume what a patient needs when I’m walking into a room, there’s a danger in assuming we “know” what to do when suffering arises. It’s important to be thoughtful about how we know that, and what informs that self-knowledge.
In the next section, we will continue our exploration through a story of acceptance in my personal journey. I cannot emphasize enough that these perspectives are more than ideas: they have meaningful, generative potential for our lives. Through this sharing, I hope we can clarify our sense of what can happen when we go towards what hurts, scares, and challenges us in life.
