For the last few weeks I have been engaging in meditation practice. It started, as many of my obsessions do, with a fairly innocuous reference to a meditation phone app in a local newscast. The newscast itself was about the stress in everyone's lives and the increase in the aforementioned stress that accompanies the holiday season. The commentator mentioned a couple of phone apps that are now available to help people deal with stress by guiding them through brief bursts of meditation that can be done anytime and anywhere.
While I found it ironic and somewhat counterproductive to think of meditation as yet another thing to quickly squeeze into a busier and busier day, I did remember the name of one of the apps mentioned, Headspace, and downloaded it for a free trial.
The first couple of times I tried it were a spectacular failure - one time I drifted off into my thoughts completely and didn't even realize the ten minute session had concluded until a few minutes after it was over. The second time I just fell asleep. Not an ideal start, but after a few days I tried again. And again...
Since an obsession isn't really an obsession unless it infiltrates multiple areas of your life, I decided I wanted to learn more about meditation and started looking for books on the topic. There are a lot of them... I mean really, really, a lot. I have neither the time nor the interest to wade through all of them but I did go through numerous reviews and settled on one that is a series of lectures by a professor of theology at Rhodes College (Mark Muesse). Normally, theology and I don't mix well so I was going into it with some reservations.
And this is where I finally get to the topic of the post... One of the lectures from the book focuses on pain and suffering and on drawing a clear distinction between the two. Prior to learning more about meditation I wouldn't necessarily have tied it to pain and suffering, but as anyone who has ever tried to sit cross-legged on the floor and keep still for longer than five minutes can attest, pain can quickly become an integral part of meditation practice. The part of the lecture that I found fascinating was the professor's determination to distinguish and separate pain from suffering.
The point he was making was that while pain is an unavoidable and ever present part of life, suffering doesn't need to be. By his definition, pain is the physical manifestation of sensations and while we often equate pain with suffering, they are not at all the same thing and they aren't even tied together, except that we join them out of habit.
I found that stance so fascinating that I actually listened to the entire lecture again, taking notes the second time around. As I was listening to it, I realized that what the professor was saying wasn't exactly new to me, it just hasn't previously been spelled out that clearly.
I've always known that pain for me doesn't necessarily equate with suffering and it isn't always a negative experience. And I readily acknowledge that it's possible to suffer great anguish without physical pain. But here is an interesting definition of suffering that I haven't come across before.
Suffering: A sustained resistance to reality; a mental and emotional struggle against the way things are.
This definition explains, perfectly, why we so often equate pain and suffering. For most people pain is unpleasant and something we want to get rid of as soon as possible. We don't want to feel it, we may find it downright offensive, the thought "I don't deserve to be in pain, I want it to go away and I want it to happen right now" is one that often accompanies pain. By greeting pain with distaste, fear, and sometimes panic, we are refusing to acknowledge the reality of being in pain and resist it. That's suffering right there. A sustained resistance to reality.
If you follow that logic, then separating pain and suffering is simple - acknowledge the pain as the reality that is and don't fight it. You don't have to like it, you just have to accept it.
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