If you’re reading this, you are browsing the endless expanse of the World Wide Web. Like we all do daily on our laptops, tablets, and smartphones, we see a link or headline that piques our interest, click on it, and begin to scroll through it until another link comes up that interests us, and we click on that one. The process goes on.
While such an activity might seem simple and commonplace in the past decade, we will eventually run into a situation that no human being throughout history has ever encountered before. Our small and limited human mind will be absolutely inundated with words, pictures, and videos of intense suffering from all around the world. In just 5 minutes, the average internet user can read a story of a hospital getting blown up in Gaza, a fire in Bangladesh, an earthquake and Tsunami in Indonesia, a murder, a shooting, a mass rape, a child with cancer getting denied treatment, the government committing human rights violations, and entire coral reefs disappearing in the face of climate change.
This process is sometimes referred to as the doomscroll: the sudden gravitation towards something negative, that propels the user to something else negative, that continues on and on.
News networks and social media sites know how to grab your attention, which is with something negative. Few people will click on an article that reads, “There was a beautiful rainbow in Montana today.” That’s because the mind has what psychologists call a negativity bias, which helped our evolutionary ancestors. It was advantageous to an organism’s survival to scan their environment for threats and remember when bad things happened in order to avoid them in the future. Unfortunately, this leftover vestige of evolutionary conditioning does little to make us happy.
I’m not that old, but I still remember a time when you would wake up in the morning and go outside to get the daily newspaper. Depending on your age and interests, you would glance over the headlines, sports, finance, or comic sections for around 20 minutes. Then you would set the newspaper down and go about your day, without exposure to what was happening on the other side of the world or even in the next town, until maybe you came home in the evening for another 30 minutes of news.
Nowadays, it seems impossible to moderate one’s media consumption, so we are ceaselessly confronted with endless negative information, tragedies, and injustices. This can easily lead to hopelessness and helplessness. It is easy to feel overwhelmed and inadequate, as we commute to our job and feel we aren’t helping any of these intense and sudden issues. It then becomes natural to close down, to shut down the heart, to feel stressed and unhappy.
This is to be expected in a world that hasn’t taught us how to meet suffering or what to do with it. We live in a world that hasn’t prioritized the needs of the heart or trained us in the cultivation of compassion.
This is precisely the gap that my latest books seek to fill. Entitled Love and Suffering: A Spiritual Guide for Helpers, Healers, and Humans, this comprehensive book is a guide to help the modern person meet suffering with a wide-open heart. While the current media environment is a modern problem, the solution comes from ancient wisdom teachings. Every generation of humanity has had its own unique suffering to overcome, and the wisdom teachings of the Buddha, Jesus Christ, Kuan Yin, Rumi, and Julian of Norwich are just as applicable today as they were when they were taught. We can also meet modern issues with the same gumption that Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King met theirs.
This book has come from the culmination of my own training and education. For almost 15 years, I have dedicated myself to bringing more love into the world, and no matter what path I took, it always led me back to suffering. And any path of suffering eventually led me back to love. When I had this realization, everything clicked. I finally understood why the Buddha taught the four Noble Truths, why Christ sits upon the Cross (an instrument of torture), and why great mystics throughout history had experienced great suffering in their lives. I realized why we all struggle in intimate relationships: the challenges are there for a reason. Romantic relationships are the perfect container for healing and growth because they put us face-to-face with our own stuff.
Rather than see suffering as an experience to be eradicated, we can see it as one of our greatest teachers. By uniting love and suffering with the practice of compassion, we are put on a path towards spiritual awakening and the joy of service. Rather than shy away from suffering, we can let it break us open.
Suffering can be a gateway to greater wisdom, understanding, and compassion. We can turn the pain into medicine to solve the world’s ills. Suffering is a great teacher, and learning how to love the world and be present with suffering puts us on the path of spiritual awakening. Challenging emotions that come upon us, even the ones that create internal distress, are there for a reason, too. By learning how to hold those emotions with loving presence and compassion, we begin a journey of coming to wholeness.
If you’re skeptical, great. As a coach and therapist, my favorite thing to do is explore my client’s resistance to new ideas and ways of living. Hopefully, by the end of the book, you will come to the same realization I did: if we let love and suffering have a marriage in the heart, they will give birth to a life of service and joy.
But what exactly are we to do when confronted with the suffering of the world? Two simple steps.
Pause and Breathe
Our first response is to put on our own oxygen mask first. We simply won’t be of service to the world if we’re mentally depleted and emotionally drained. Nor will we meet the world in the right way if we are coming from a place of anger and self-righteousness.
Our first step is to pause, breathe, and check in with what’s really going on inside. When we do that, we will notice that our anger, frustration, and hopelessness at the violence and suffering of the world is causing us personal suffering. The heart aches, our heart aches. That’s the first step: to notice and recognize what is happening right here, right now.
Then we can offer ourselves kindness in the moment. Which most of the time will involve putting the phone down and doing something that nourishes us. The sooner and quicker you can do this, the better it will be. Doom-scrolling for 3 hours straight is not good for the soul. Simply put, we don’t need to know something bad has happened as soon as it happens. We can wait.
We can turn off the phone or news alerts, or television for 8-12 hours of the day and be none the worse for it. We can then put digital detoxes in other areas of our lives. A timer that turns off the internet at 9 pm. A Sunday free of technology, a week-long spiritual retreat. Anything that helps to moderate and bring balance to screen time and life-time.
Open the Heart and Act
This might seem like two steps, but it’s actually one, because action without love can harm others, while love without action is empty. “If you have love, you will do all things well,” wrote Thomas Merton.
If our heart is open, we will bring love to every act we do, large and small. As Mother Theresa said, “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.” I would argue that anything done with great love is a great thing, a big thing, a huge thing, with the greatest potential for lasting change.
Most likely, an action we take today won’t end a war tomorrow. But taking small actions does help us move from hopelessness to hopefulness, from loss of control to feeling empowered. In therapy, we have an idea of the “locus of control.” It’s a tool to empower people to make concrete actions in their lives and end wallowing in despair at their present conditions. Few things are as healing as letting go of things outside of your control and focusing on what you can control.
Along with our actions, another aspect of life that is within our control is our own attitude to the present situation. Wisdom teachings throughout time tell us that we can choose our internal attitude no matter our external circumstances. “Love in joy, in peace, even among the troubled,” said the Buddha.
So why not choose an attitude of love? For when our love meets the suffering in the world, it blossoms into compassion. We soon learn on this path that a wide-open heart is bigger than the world, bigger than the entire universe. It can hold whatever suffering is happening here, there, and everywhere. Yes, life is fragile; it may seem like things can fall apart at any moment. But love is the glue.
