Suffering is Resisted Experience

Suffering is Resisted Experience It has been wisely pointed out that there is a difference between suffering & pain. We suffer when we resist pain. Pain, in and of itself, is nothing but electrical activity in the body. Suffering comes in as our brains resist or react to the stimuli of pain. To directly experience the pain, without resistance, is to conquer and dispel it.

The pain, which can come from experience, is no different. It is when we resist this pain, refusing actually to feel it in its totality, that we build the buffers, which cause us to suffer. But, rightly so. Pain unbuffered can knock us off our seat. But, once our initial resistance is set up, it must be relaxed so that the flow of our emotions can be restored. For it is only then that we can become open to true joy and comfort again.

But we are afraid to move from this tailored world we have fashioned for ourselves, fearing the constant change which is the very nature of life.

A Zen master has said that, “in this life we are always subject to some conditions or other.” We move through our experience hoping that, if we just get through this last one, we will at last be “there”. But we can go through our whole lives and not realize that “there’ is “here” - that the present is all we ever have.

By clinging to experience; to our egos; to our emotions; our very being and life; we put up the resistance which causes us to suffer. To be open to experience; to embrace what we are given, in the abundance all around and within us, we cannot fail to expand into the vastness of experience inner and outer, which opens out to us once we have abandoned peevish clinging. ~ David Young