There is a well-known saying: “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.”
What does it mean?
Here is an example: about 6 years ago, I was standing on the top of a ladder, trimming a dead tree branch. Suddenly, the ladder began sinking into a gopher hole and out of instinct, I jumped onto our stone patio. Ouch! The immediate pain was sharp and undeniable, and sure enough, I had to go to the emergency room to be diagnosed with a broken heel bone.
The pain was real. But in the days that followed, my mind rushed in guilt and self-criticism, “Why didn’t I check the ground more carefully?” and “What if…?”
That’s when the suffering began.
Let me share another story. Last year, I met Toshiko Tanaka, a survivor of the Hiroshima Bombing. She was six years old when the atomic bomb fell. Her mother didn’t think she would survive as she fell into a coma and was very badly burned. Out of her entire kindergarten class of more than fifty children, she was the only survivor.
For decades, she never spoke about what happened. In Japan, it was a social taboo to discuss it, and she would be seen as bad. All were meant to forget about it. Her suffering lived silently within.
Her healing began when she started to process her suffering in expressing her emotions through the art. Finally, in her 70’s, Tanaka began to speak about it. Her suffering lessened even more, when she felt safe enough to allow the feelings to surface.
Every culture has its own ways of teaching emotional suppression.
Boys don’t cry. Good girls don’t get angry.
Don’t be a burden. Keep your chin up.
Such phrases, though often well-intentioned, create invisible cages around our emotional lives, teaching us that certain feelings are culturally unacceptable.
Even collectively it can manifest in many ways, from self-destructive behavior, numbness, depression, irritability, aggression towards others, or even war.
You probably know of similar experiences. Pain and trauma, physical or emotional, are what happen. Suffering starts when we can’t express our feelings fully, and our mind adds its story. It’s the worry, the resentment, or the rejection with thoughts like “This shouldn’t have happened.” “I can’t accept this.” Those thoughts add to the pain and keep it alive.
Think about it this way:
“Pain is to the body what suffering is to the mind.”
Many of us carry an entire library of stories, sometimes repeated over a lifetime. The unhealed wounds, unpleasant situations, or trauma from childhood to present times – sometimes even inherited from our family, culture, and the collective field – called the morphogenetic field.
All unhealed wounds and trauma stay in our emotional body, which Eckhart Tolle calls the pain-body in his best-selling book The Power of Now. The emotional body is without time and space, omnipresent. A look, a tone of voice, a memory, or a situation might suddenly trigger those wounds, and we react through the filter of the past experiences – and not appropriately to the present situation.
Meanwhile, the mind keeps looping in its linear, cause-and-effect thinking, feeding into the emotional body with endless storytelling.
The Core–Wound–Defense Mechanism
The Core-Wound-Defense Model gives a deeper understanding, see the following diagram. At the center of who we are lies our essence – the pure I Am, awareness, presence. Yet over time, layers of wounds and hurts build around it.
To cope and protect us, we instinctively build defenses – control, withdrawal, perfectionism, people-pleasing, anger, blame. These patterns protect us for a time, but eventually they harden into habits that shape our personality. We begin to believe this is who we are.
The Healing Journey
Healing begins when we bring awareness to what we feel, when we give it expression instead of suppression. Awareness breaks the cycle of suffering. The power of healing lays in allowing our feelings, staying present with it, giving it acknowledgement, compassion and loving kindness. In case of deep wounds and trauma it needs the support of a professional.
As the saying goes: “You have to feel it to heal it.”
Think of a little child who cuts a finger: crying intensely one moment, laughing a few minutes later. The pain is felt fully, then it is released.
If resistance come up, notice it, stay in awareness. Choose acceptance over rejection and move towards the feeling. Breathe into it.
Rejection of our feelings creates suffering. – Acceptance of our feelings leaves the pain. – Pain subsides; suffering prolongs.
The next time you are in pain, pause and ask yourself:
Am I adding suffering – or am I choosing awareness?
