How to suffer less
Learn how awareness can help you meet pain, notice your mind’s stories, and practice responding in ways that lessen suffering.
Ok folks, I’m challenging myself to write shorter pieces for the internet.
So I thought I’d take on the light, simple topic of human suffering for the first one.
You suffer. I suffer. We all suffer together. Buddha is famously quoted as saying “life is suffering” thousands of years ago, so one could assume that this whole suffering business is unavoidable, right?
Well, what the Buddha actually said in Pali is that life is dukkha. Dukkha doesn’t have a perfect English equivalent, but I personally treat it more like “pain” or “bleh-ness.” I wrote a whole article about it that you can read here.
So if you accept that pain is unavoidable and not something you can actually eliminate, life on paper starts to look something like this.
Life just happens, and our mind gives it labels
If we had to sum those labels up, they’re basically “good,” “bad,” and “neutral.”
These labels aren’t inherent—meaning not every single person in the world would agree that a thing is “good” or “bad.” Good and bad are the result of our mind’s judgements and perspectives—not an indisputable fact of life.
Our minds make these judgments because it’s conducive to our survival. Painful things = bad, pleasurable things = good. They’re also never going to stop doing that, because again, that’s just how a human brain works.
You can have the most intense meditation or spiritual practice in the world, and it will still never get you to a place in which you do not feel pain in your body anymore. That’s fine, because quite often, our attempts to avoid pain can lead to us creating more of it.
Consider an agoraphobic, a micromanaging boss, and a bougie first-class flyer. These people all structure their lives to avoid different kinds of pain. The agoraphobic avoids the discomfort of panicking in public, the micromanager avoids the pain of making a mistake, and the first-class flier avoids the discomfort of flying coach.
The cost of those behaviors? The agoraphobic may avoid leaving their home, the boss is filled with stress and worry, and the bougie flier has the resilience of a wet pasta noodle. All of our efforts to not experience pain always come at a cost—sometimes an invisible one—that just brings us more suffering down the line.
So, what’s a human to do when we see that avoidance and control inevitably shoot us in the foot?
Well, first, we give up!
You are going to get hurt—yay!
I’m not going to gaslight you into masochism, don’t worry.
Pain sucks, even though on the absolute level, it provides the context through which we can even know and categorize pleasure. Still—nobody wants to get hurt because that’s just how bodies work.
But accepting that a lot of life’s pain is unavoidable is the first step towards a practice that can actually help you suffer less. Because while pain is a temporary, body-based experience, suffering is the mental stories that prolong and intensify that pain.
Stubbing your toe is pain. Yelling at an inanimate object because you stubbed your toe and berating yourself about it for 10 minutes after is suffering. The first is mandatory, the latter is optional.
So the question then becomes—how do we at least lessen our suffering for the really big shit? For the inevitable losses, the betrayals, disappointments, and illnesses?
Let’s click back to our graph for a minute. The line represents the direction our mind gets pulled in as life unfolds around us as pleasure or pain. We already said that preventing the pull from happening in the first place is futile, but notice how some of those waves are much smaller than others?
A smaller and thinner wave means less suffering over time. The wave can only stay small and thin when the mind doesn’t get yanked too far into pain too deeply and/or for too long.
And the only hope you have of doing that—of staying centered in chaos and pain while your mind wants to freak out about it—is having a developed sense of consciousness.
Consciousness is your absolute identity
Ask yourself in your head, “I wonder what my next thought will be?” and then come back here in a few seconds.
What happened? If you’re like most people, you probably experienced your mind blanking out. That’s what it does when you start watching it very closely.
Well, that begs the next question—where are “you” actually watching from? If your mind stops but you’re still there…where exactly are you?
Let’s explore that with another example. You remember being a kid, right? Are you the same “you” as you were back then?
You have a different body, and you definitely have a different, more advanced mind. But…you’re also still, obviously, the same “you” as you were back then.
That blank, basic sense of “I am” that we all have within us is consciousness. It’s the context in which our minds—and our entire lives, really—appear. It’s us, and we are it.
Understanding that is big—it’s often called “awakening” in spiritual circles—but understanding alone isn’t enough because consciousness isn’t a concept or a thought. It exists before those things.
You’re thinking about consciousness now because you're reading my conceptual words about it, but ultimately, you have to feel it yourself to really know it. And after you first touch it, you have to practice with it in order for it to become helpful.
There are many ways to practice honing consciousness. Meditation is one way, but it’s not the only way.
A simple practice you can do is to do a simple action—like washing your hands or doing the dishes—slowly and deliberately. Focus entirely on the sensations you feel while you wash and move things around.
Living from consciousness feels a lot like living from the flow state, which I’m sure you’ve felt before. You’re so aligned with the present moment that for a short time, there’s no “doer” and object being “done to” anymore—there’s just the unified action of “doing.”
That state is crucial when you’re trying to suffer less because it’s what allows you to not get taken on a ride along with your mind.
Let’s look at a mundane example comparing two people—Unconscious Ulf and Conscious Cammy.
- Unconscious Ulf notices that his partner left the dishes from last night’s dinner in the sink even though he promised he’d put them in the dishwasher.
- Ulf’s mind immediately spins up angry stories about the partner. How could they forget? They’re so inconsiderate! These stories make Ulf’s body feel the sensations of anger. Ulf is in pain.
- Ulf is still unconscious, so he does not have the ability to observe his anger. The anger possesses him entirely. This is where Ulf’s suffering begins.
- Ulf yells at his partner, they have a fight, and the partner goes to work. Ulf stays angry the rest of the day because he keeps thinking about how inconsiderate his partner is. Ulf continues to suffer, far beyond the initial, painful moment of anger.
Poor Ulf, right? Let’s look at this from the perspective of someone who’s awake.
- Conscious Cammy notices that her partner left the dishes from last night’s dinner in the sink even though he promised he’d put them in the dishwasher.
- Cammy’s mind immediately spins up angry stories about the partner. How could they forget? They’re so inconsiderate! These stories make Cammy’s body feel the sensations of anger. Cammy is in pain.
- Cammy is conscious, though, so there’s a place within her through which she can observe and watch her anger. She gives the sensations of anger her full, loving attention, and ignores all the stories her mind tries to hook her with. This doesn’t happen right away. Cammy needs to stay with the feelings for a few mins, but in doing so, she does not suffer.
- Cammy expresses her anger to her partner calmly and rationally. They do not fight and the partner apologizes. Cammy accepts, and while her mind might still throw up a story or two about the partner as she goes about her day, she mostly ignores them and again, does not suffer.
It’s harder, yet easier, to be like Cammy
One of the starkest differences between how Cammy and Ulf react above is that Cammy is really good at not letting her own thinking control her. She’s able to ignore all the stories her mind generates about her anger and instead, can just be with the anger as a series of painful sensations in her body.
She’s not really “doing” too much, but there is certainly some effort involved in not acting immediately from her mind or emotions, in taking a pause, and most notably, in being willing to experience the discomfort and pain of being angry.
Our boy Ulf, on the other hand, just lets his anger take over and lashes out. That’s much easier in the short term, but far more destructive long-term. Ulf might have his day ruined over something mundane. And in the very long term, outbursts like that may push his partner away.
What’s funny is we’re not always aware that this is what our minds are getting us to do. Everything that plays out in 3D reality—the yelling, the arguing, the blaming—is all just serving to distract us from the fact that our bodies are going through pain, and our mind does not like that.
Any other painful emotion plays the same game. The mind wants to do anything other than just let the body feel like shit for a short period of time.
The principle of reducing our suffering is the same principle we reviewed in the examples above.
Do you want to do the uncomfortable thing now, so that you feel a lot better in the long run? Or do you want to avoid discomfort right now, but feel a lot worse in the long run?
Most people take the latter path constantly because they are unconscious. You don’t actually get a choice between being Cammy or Ulf until you’re conscious, but once you wake up, then it’s going to be on you to decide for the rest of your life.
Can you meet the inevitable painful events and feelings head on and allow them to contract your body? Can you commit to being with that pain for however long it needs your loving attention? Can you get really good at delaying emotional gratification (from snappy clapbacks to giant middle fingers), mistrusting your worst thoughts, and taking actions that don’t harm or bring pain to others?
If you can, then I believe your waves of suffering will be small ripples on a relatively calm, content pond. If you cannot or choose not to, then those waves will be larger and will disturb your contentment more intensely and/or for a lot longer.
And before you think there’s a way to be perfect at this, let me remind you this is called a practice for a reason. You will probably still fuck up and suffer. There are no A+’s in the game of contentment. What matters most is that you consistently try to remain conscious and commit to doing better when you go off the rails.
I hope this helps you see the mechanics of suffering more clearly. Please leave questions in the comments below—I’d love to hear from you!
Photo credit: Chris Cosenza via Unsplash
