Pain vs Suffering

“Follow your path to the end

Accept difficulty as an opportunity

This is the sure way to end up with no difficulties at all”

— Verse 63, Tao Te Ching

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I woke up with a sharp shooting pain in my neck. “Crick” would be an understatement.

“You’re tense,” Jimmy says.

I guess he’s right, but I hadn’t noticed.

Last week, it wasn’t just my neck. It was the entire upper torso of my body. I’d watched too many murder shows and then slept weird.

Nightmares. Night sweats.

This morning, I’m not sure. But if I had to bet money on it, I’d say watching Netflix in bed at a weird angle right before falling asleep wasn’t a good idea.

I’d say there are some behaviours I need to release.

I’m in pain. But if I wanted, I could turn this pain into suffering.

I could seize onto the narrative of my painful body and twist it into something extra. More nefarious.

I could become obsessed with my own well-crafted story of suffering, stare at it lovingly like Narcissus at the edge of the river, gazing into his own reflection. If I were to do that, perhaps I could stay in pain forever.

I could turn pain into suffering and bathe in it every day.

When you try to heal something, you often do as many things as you can to release the ailment. If you have a cough or cold, you don’t just curl up with chicken broth. You also rest, sleep extra, stay warm, maybe take a hot bath, rub eucalyptus on your chest, and read your favourite books.

It’s hard to say which EXACT thing made you better because it was the layering of things. All changes together created the conditions—internal and external—for healing.

Healing is rarely a one-step job.

But sometimes, you can see or feel a correlation between one dramatically different action and an unfurling within, an irrefutable transformation.

For me, it was the end of social media and the news cycle.

Last year, I started experiencing a version of acid reflux that silently attacks the throat at night. (It’s called Silent Reflux or LPR.) I lost my voice. It felt like there was something stuck in my throat for months. Every day I would wake up and hope that the “thing” in my throat would be gone. But it was still there.

I did so many things to heal—all of them important. But there’s one thing I did just recently that put an end to a lot of suffering I was still experiencing. Self-inflicted pain that was jangling my insides.

I stopped scrolling the feeds.

No more Globe and Mail, National Post, Twitter scavenger hunts, or Substack deep dives. If it looked like news or satire based on the news or experts re-hashing the news or unveiling the lies embedded in the news, I was out.

No more news.

I didn’t do this on purpose. It wasn’t some dramatic announcement, like “I’m ready to heal and end the suffering by cutting out the wound-inflicting vampire that is modern media.”

Nope.

I went to Ecuador. To the beach. To a place where the sun looks like a tangerine as it sets, dripping into the horizon with the quiet drama of an aging drag queen.

There was a gecko that would chirp every half hour as he scuttered about the adobe walls. Birds sang in the rustling branches of the trees. The air was warm, salty—the faint whizz of the cars shuffling along the practically-dirt highway, calming.

We ate fresh shrimp and gallons of limonada. Lay in the hammocks. Went on beach walks and adventures up in the semi-jungled hills.

I couldn’t get it up for the news.

I tried to scroll through Twitter a couple of times, but it fell flat. It just didn’t matter.

There was a dissonance between the reality of the world I was inhabiting and the caffeinated news cycle on Twitter. For over two years, I’d been in the hole. Deep diving into every new piece of information that was revealed about the global drama.

Every corruption and concern needed to be investigated. I learned a lot. A LOT. I used to wonder how all the puzzle pieces fit together in this global political mess. I don’t wonder anymore. Not because it’s perfectly clear. The anti-symbiotic relationships of global power mongers are a hot mess. Nobody will ever really know what’s going on in the world at a given time. There are too many stories. But if you think it’s bad, it’s probably worse.

Suffering.

They are all suffering.

The people who cavort about at secret world conferences power broking deals are suffering.

I was suffering.

Now, I’m just in pain.

What’s the difference? Does it matter?

Pain is unavoidable. It’s the headache from working too long. It’s the crick in the neck because you slept badly. It’s the baseball injury that flares up when the weather turns cold. The stubbed toe, the broken leg. The heartache of knowing someone you love just died, and you’ll never see his earthly body again. Never see his smile or hear his laughter.

But suffering. Suffering is a story.

It’s an ocean of ideas that we throw ourselves into. We let it wash into our bones, let it eat up our marrow. We soak in it until it’s embedded.

But it IS temporary. It can be.

When I stopped scrolling and eating up news like Cinnamon Crunch breakfast cereal, I inadvertently cut a major thread of suffering out of my life. I didn’t heal instantly. But within a few weeks, my brain felt less crazy. My mood lifted. I had more energy.

I could SEE my life more clearly.

Suffering isn’t always a choice. Sometimes you can’t see it. You don’t know or can’t acknowledge that you’re doing it to yourself.

But you are. We are.

Like Narcissus, we all get glued to ideas that are draining rather than elevating. Nobody is immune.

Echo and Narcissus by John William Waterhouse

But there are tools we can use to allow inner freedom and spaciousness to prevail. These are a few tools that I’m going to keep using as I aim to excavate suffering while allowing room for pain:

1) Feel the feeling so it can pass through. If I feel the feeling, I won’t need to drown it with substances or narratives.

2) Ask myself: Is this pain or is this suffering?

3) As myself: What is fact and what is story? Can I drop the story?

4) Practice the Byron Katie’s The Work. It really works!

5) Cultivate inner and outer conditions for healing. The terrain matters. Inputs affect outputs. What I feed my mind and body will show up in my cells. The thoughts that I think incessantly change more than just my neural pathways—they change my biochemistry.

The pain in my neck hurts a lot less. I’m still a little grumpy about it. It’s 7:52. I’ve had half my coffee. I know I need to investigate what my body is trying to tell me. Get curious. Ask questions. I’ll do that. Promise.

But first, I promise that I won’t add guilt and self-criticism to the mix. I won’t let suffering become the host of the show or add salt to self-inflicted wounds.

There’s no doubt that the pain in my neck is a flag in the wind. It’s waving toward something that needs my attention. Probably, it’s time to relax. Rest. Let go of a certain ambitious thought pattern that’s been taking over the airways of my personal radio station.

Today, I embrace pain and let go of suffering.

-Colette Nichol-