You cannot suffer without your cooperation

In our day-to-day life, many of us tend to mix pain, problem and suffering and get into constant state of being in misery. Human beings are capable of suffering just about anything. Someone doesn’t have a job, so he suffers. Someone has a job, so he suffers even more. Someone isn’t married, so he suffers. Someone got married, and now he is in agony! Someone is distraught that he has no children. Someone else has children, and lives in constant anxiety.  

Let us first make the distinction between pain, problem and suffering. Pain is physical; it is useful as a valuable wake-up call when there is injury to the body. Problem is an abnormal event happened to us in our day-to-day life. Suffering, on the other hand, is psychological. It is hundred percent self-manufactured. You do not have a choice about being in pain or problem, but you can always choose not to suffer.

A situation in itself does not cause suffering. It is how you react to it. For example, if a student is suffering because he scored low marks in a critical examination. If he keeps dwelling in the low score marks again and again without doing anything to come out of it, he is choosing the path of no-action to prevent it again. It leads to further loss of energy as he is not performing his duty required for this hour. In this process, he is preferring the path of forcing himself into constant problems. This leads to suffering to himself and misery to the entire family. Instead, if he chooses to retrospect honestly, why he scored less marks and starts addressing the causes that are in his control, he slowly start seeing the light in his face because he is progressing towards the path of hope. By choosing to admit the mistake honestly and doing a sincere attempt not to repeat the mistake, he is moving himself out of the suffering zone because he is progressing on the path of hope. When we flow towards path of hope with integrated honesty and sweat, we can certainly throw ourselves away from suffering. 

If a man complains that his heart is clogged up, is it because he committed some terrible crime? No. It is much more likely that he lived irresponsibly, ate and drank improperly and messed up his system.  When the problem or pain gives us the alarm, we need to retrospect the reality and start acting on it. When we draw a line between what is in our control and what is not in our control .. similarly.. where I can bring the change and where I cannot ….When we start making progress on the capable areas, we start getting the hope… This hope slowly turns into energetic confidence. We can thus pedal us gradually to fade away our suffering because our path is now full of hope, action and flow towards the progress.

In summary, pain is physical, problem is event based, but suffering is only of the mind. If you are suffering mentally, it means that you are manufacturing your own anguish. In other words, your cannot suffer without your cooperation. With this awareness, you reach the end of suffering. When we start making progress towards hope with whatever we can do every day, we can slowly see shine towards energetic tomorrow. This awareness can end our suffering. God will indeed support us when we deliver our best honest action to address this suffering.

(Reference: "Awareness can end your suffering" By Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev - Times of India - Dated 30-Jan-2021)