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This is FiveMinuteFriday, Pain versus Suffering.
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Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast, everybody. Super excited to have you back here on the show. I was speaking with our company coach recently, and we got onto the topic of pain and suffering. And I was very intrigued. I learned quite a bit, and I wanted to share some of the things here with you today.
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So we often experience pain and sometimes it can last for a long time, right? So sometimes the after effect of certain pain can continue with us. Well, actually what I discovered is that that is not the pain continuing. That is a suffering and suffering is something that is created by our mind. And today I wanted to share what I learned about separating the two, what it means, what these two things mean separately, because I think it can be very useful to managing the suffering.
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So what is pain? Well, pain can be physical pain. It can be emotional pain. For instance, a bruise, a cold, a stomach ache, examples of physical pain. Examples of emotional pain, a breakup. For instance, construction work outside your house is giving you stress or fear about an upcoming presentation. That’s fear. That’s also a pain in itself. So those are examples of emotional pain. And pain is something that’s caused by the outside world. And it just is. However, suffering is when you add a narration to that pain. Actually, when your mind adds a narration to that pain.
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For instance, all of us have, at some point in our lives had an itch, right? Like your eyebrow itches or your toe itches or something, you go and itch it. So that’s an example of physical pain, but have you ever been in a situation where you have an itch and you cannot scratch it? Like, for instance, I don’t know, you are standing in a bus and you cannot reach where you need to scratch, like your toes, or maybe you are in a special kind of suit or a circumstance, or you’re at dinner or something that you just basically cannot attend to it right now. Or you’re holding something and behind your ear itches and you can’t scratch it right now. Have you ever been in a situation like that?
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Well, for me, what happens is I start getting more and more anxious about it. It starts with an itch, but then I start like, got to scratch it now. If I can’t scratch it now, it’s going to… You just start getting this kind of panicky feeling out of nowhere, which really has nothing to do with the pain itself. It’s just a narration that our mind creates to force us to go and scratch that itch.
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So that’s an example of a physical pain that can be a simple, trivial, physical pain, like an itch, if you think about it. It’s nothing, no big deal, but it can cause so much suffering that we just drop whatever we’re doing and go and scratch it. Or if you can’t do it for a long time, then you can actually start to feel panic and anxiety. And of course, that works for other physical pains. Like, you could have a broken bone, but then that can cause a lot of suffering for months after that. So even after it’s healed, you can have the narrative of, I shouldn’t have ridden my bicycle on that day, or I should have worn a helmet or whatever else. And it just continues and continues. And you just beat yourself up about it and continue for months or even years.
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On the other hand, in terms of emotional pain, for instance, if a family member dies, for years after that, we can suffer, right? Because then our narrative might be that I should’ve done this differently. I should have said this to them while they were still alive. I should have spent more time with them and things like that. And again, that narrative that we create for ourselves turns this pain into suffering and then prolongs it. And the thing here is that pain is natural. It will happen in life. Suffering is a question of response. Suffering is a choice. It’s how we respond to this pain, what narrative we let our minds create. And that will determine if we suffer and for how long we suffer.
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I’m nowhere near this myself, I just learned this recently, but it is indeed possible if you think about it to experience pain in your life without crossing the line into suffering. There’s a quote from Buddha, which states that ‘pain is inevitable, suffering is optional’. So we cannot escape pain in our lives. Pain is a natural phenomenon of existing, but at the same time, suffering is something we create in our minds for ourselves. And therefore it’s optional. How cool is that? Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
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So the question is how do you avoid suffering? Well, the answers in stilling your mind, you need to still your mind, to quieten your mind. And in that way, you’ll be able to process the pain, whether physical, emotional much more quickly. Of course, this requires lots of training and practice. And in fact, that’s one of the objectives of meditation. It doesn’t eliminate pain. Meditation is not designed to eliminate pain. Meditation eliminates suffering. Through stilling the mind and quietening it, you can just experience pain, but not the suffering.
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And of course, this is not a one FiveMinuteFriday episode thing. It would require quite a lot of practice and meditation and other things. And that’s for each one of us to explore on our own. But what I wanted to share here is the awareness, that there is this distinction, and should you decide to, you can, of course, explore it further. And maybe right now it’s not relevant, but maybe one day you will have pain that will turn into suffering. And then you will know that maybe this is something that might be useful to you.
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There is one thing you can try out already today, or this weekend. It’s quite a fun exercise. And that is to wait for the moment when you have a small physical pain in your day. It might be something as simple as it can itch as we discussed, or maybe you’ll be sitting uncomfortably somewhere and you’ll have a bit of discomfort, which is a form of physical pain. Discomfort in your lower left ribs, or maybe something like that. Some kind of not major, small pain that you witness, you notice. And so the exercise is to observe it and not doing anything about it. So don’t scratch that itch. Don’t change your sitting position, unless of course it’s a dangerous situation or anything. But if everything is safe and you can, you think it’s safe to let that pain be for a bit, let it be and witness what happens. Witness how your mind creates the suffering around that pain.
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However, insignificant, if we let it prolong, what will happen? Will it just be okay and will you be able to accept it or will your mind start creating suffering, start creating a narrative around that pain, why you have to act and immediately change something to run away from that pain? That’s what our minds are designed to do to help us survive because prolonged pain means in many cases, death, but we also are conscious that if it’s a small thing, like an itch, it’s probably not going to do much harm. So it’s interesting to observe that and see what happens, see how long you can sit with that feeling and what happens next.
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So there we go. That’s pain versus suffering. Hopefully, that is helpful, and if not, at least the awareness will allow you to maybe consider this sometime in the future and come back to it. We’re also going to include a video about this topic. I found a really nice video by, I believe a psychologist or some lady on YouTube named Christina Lopez. So we’ll share that in the show notes if you want to check it out and learn a bit more, that could be useful too. On that note, it was a great pleasure having you here today. And I look forward to seeing you back next time. Until then, happy analyzing.
