We are just one week away from the United States release of Love and Suffering: A Spiritual Guide for Helpers, Healers, and Humans.
The message of the book is simple: we must learn to face, embrace, feel, and transform our suffering. Only by uniting love and suffering with the practice of compassion will the world finally know peace.
Suffering is at the heart of the human condition, and we must give up endlessly and fruitlessly trying to eradicate it from our lives. Rather, we can love suffering the way we would a child having a tantrum: by holding it, learning what happened to cause the emotional turbulence, and letting the storm pass, as all storms do.
I cover many reasons in the book for why we should transform our suffering. Suffering is an opportunity for growth. Suffering is a messenger. Suffering is a gateway to compassion. The label of suffering as “bad” is a symptom of dualistic thinking and not a reflection of reality as it is. Transcend good and bad and you will transcend the illusion of suffering.
But if I were to focus on one reason, the most important reason of all, to transform our suffering, it is this: If you don’t transform your suffering, you will transmit it.
If you aren’t able to hold your own pain, you will unconsciously spread it and give it to anyone and everyone around you. Your partner, your family, your children, and your children’s children will all take on the suffering that you refuse to face.
This is the lesson of endless wars and violence we see in society: in order to create peace in this world, you must first create peace in yourself. This is the lesson of intergenerational trauma: you can stop it. You can short-circuit the cycles that kept your ancestors stuck in anger and pain.
Transforming your suffering now also prevents you from transmitting it back to your future self! Just like the little pain to fix a dental cavity to prevent a larger pain in the future, meeting your suffering now will prevent much more intense suffering in the future.
There’s a funny story I originally heard from Anthony De Mello that goes like this:
A man is sitting on a train with a suitcase in his lap. Another man sits down next to him and asks, “What is it you got there in your bag?”
The man replies, “I have an unexploded bomb here, and I’m taking it to the police station.”
“Good god!” the second man replies, “An unexploded bomb! Dear God! Don’t put it on your lap. Quick, put it under your seat!”
The moral of the story is this: we think we can repress and suppress dangerous thoughts, emotions, and beliefs, but that doesn’t remove their power to destroy us. As any psychologist will tell you, repression and denial only work in the short term. In the long term, repression causes a lot of suffering.
Buried feelings never die. Denying suffering only makes it stronger. Fighting the monster only makes it angrier. We must transform our suffering by learning to love it and embrace it. We must find the courage to face the darkness to transform it into the light.
We must understand the nature of suffering to lessen its burden on ourselves and others. A doctor must understand the nature of an illness to help their patient. A therapist must understand mental suffering in order to help their patient. By looking deeply at our own hatred, anger, and propensity for violence, we gain a greater ability to create peace. This will cure the world.
So this is one of the most important lessons of suffering: if you don’t transform it, you will transmit it. For the good of others, your children, and the world, learn to face the necessary suffering of life and find true freedom on the other side. The only way out is through.
