What is Suffering?

Suffering is such an overused and under-specific term in meditation practice and spirituality. The idea that there is one technique or tool that can remove all types of suffering is absurd.

There are a number of things that suffering can mean, and each of them requires a different approach for someone to be able to meet it, to understand it, to accept it, or to ease it.

Here are just some of the things that suffering can mean:

1. The resistance you feel to how things are/anxiety/existential fear/dukkha
2. Emotional pain
3. Physical pain
4. Trauma
5. Not getting your physical needs met, including enough human connection
6. Being oppressed; existing in a toxic or unsafe environment
7. Doing overly difficult, tiring or stressful things, which a lot of the time includes just existing as a human in this world
8. The pain that comes with growth and going out of your comfort zone

Each one of them needs a different response in order to be able to accept it, get insight from it, heal it, soften around it, grow from it, or allow it to pass.

When people lump every possible negative valence experience together as ‘suffering’ or come up with one blanket solution to try and solve people’s problems for them, it’s not very helpful. All of these types of suffering exist in a complex eco-system, and there is no single root cause for all of them.

Using a blanket term for suffering also minimises theory of mind and the compassion it is possible to feel for other beings. If you flatten someone’s experience into a 2D concept, it’s very easy to believe you understand what they are going through and that you have the answers that will help them fix it.

Sometimes people suffer because they enjoy it or because it is easy, but often this is not the case. People usually suffer because they have no choice, because they believe it is the best option they have, or because they believe that the payoff of the suffering in the short term will be worth it in the long run.

There is also an aspect of ‘suffering’ that is deeply meaningful and a vital aspect of living an engaged, awake life. Life isn’t perfect, and being present, awake, and loving involves being open to feeling the depths of experience, which include things like sadness, grief, and disappointment.

If you equate dukkha or ‘suffering’ with pain and try to completely get rid of this from your experience, you will turn yourself into a psychopath.

There are meaningful, open-hearted, and direct ways to suffer, and there are self-involved, closed-hearted, or overwhelming ways to suffer. You want to make more space for the former and try to transform your relationship to experience to reduce the latter, for yourself and all beings.

In order to reduce suffering, it requires there to be a different option or way of being that can release people from the underlying cause of the suffering. This is going to be different depending on what type of suffering it is.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of powerful modalities that address different types of suffering at different levels and in different ways, and recognising the value and importance of this complex, multi-dimensional approach is vital for creating the capacity to be able to create more freedom for individuals and societies.

Suffering is Relative

Suffering is relative, in both senses of the word.

When you have built some resiliency, wellbeing, and perspective into your system, things that would have previously been overwhelming can seem like less of a big deal. The size of the suffering is relative to what you are capable of handling.

But it is also relative in the sense that suffering arises from the connection between yourself and the other person or thing you are interacting with.

Someone can be a super Zen practitioner, but if they are in a toxic environment, there will be suffering of some kind. Everyone has physical, emotional, and mental limits. Life is incredibly hard, and these limits are being pushed for most people all the time.

You don’t exist separately from the environment or relationships around you, and this means that as an individual you can’t just do a thing that means that you will be free from all types of suffering forever.

To be truly free from suffering requires some level of harmony and peace with the environment around you, and this will come as much from your environment as it does from you. There’s a reason why people who seriously want to be free from suffering become monks and nuns and remove themselves from the chaos of society.

The Collective

It can take a village to reduce suffering.

In order to create a society with a significant reduction in suffering, it’s going to take creating resilient, joyful, caring, open practices, and environments where people can connect with each other with more ease, resource themselves, and discover new ways of being that are more supportive for them.

Recognising this need for a new style of practice and sangha while also understanding the different types of suffering and different appropriate ways of working with them feels vital to creating a spirituality where people are able to be present with a wider range of experience. The approach needs to be compassionate, trauma-informed, responsive, inspiring, and inclusive in order to make a real impact. It also needs to have clear expectations about people being able to be adults and bear their challenges with some grace.

When people are in spaces where they feel safe, open, and resourced, they are no longer putting all their energy into managing things or protecting themselves. Immediate suffering is reduced, but people are also able to open to new experiences and aspects of their being much more easily. It gives people a safe place to play with consciousness and experience different ways of being that open doors of perception to a deeper way of understanding the Universe.

This deeper way of understanding the Universe can ease suffering in unexpected ways, which can then become fuel, resilience, and inspiration for contributing to building a better society that creates more freedom for everyone.

It is worth recognising that it takes an enormous amount of resource to create an environment where this style of deep and rigorous practice can happen, and it takes a lot of wholehearted willingness from participants to actually show up in the depths of the experience. It’s good not to underestimate the challenge that real awakening is and what it actually takes to reduce and ease suffering in the world.