Suffering and happiness are two experiences of your life that will be part of it throughout your whole life. But the problem starts happening: how much are you capable of manufacturing suffering in your life and distributing it in areas of your life where it should not be? It’s all happening within your mind, and this all happens when you are into your intellect and stuck into it and keep on producing without knowing that, and you become a nonstop suffering human being. We have to understand that suffering is self-created. Whatever experience you are facing right now in your life, that’s all produced by you; you create it, consciously or unconsciously, but whatever life situation you are in right now, it’s all your actions and decisions that you made or are making. And when it comes to dealing with it, you have to be self-aware of your actions, and here we will look into the strategies that we can apply in our lives to deal with suffering.
What Is Suffering?
Suffering is a state of mind in which you can be part of your distress situation, under any pain experiences, going through any hardship, and so on. It is our common experience, and here are some given:
- Suffering in the Body: Here you can feel pain or discomfort that is coming from your injury or you are going through any illness, for example, body pain, broken leg, or chronic disease.
- Emotional Suffering: This happens due to loss, and that gets connected with your feelings and keeps happening in your brain, for example, from your family, someone dead, or in a relationship, hearsay, or on and on. Emotional suffering often connects with our sadness and grief.
- Mental Suffering: Trauma, hopelessness, nervousness, or so on are just a few examples of mental suffering, and these experiences can happen in your life from various conditions such as personal, environmental, and genetic influences.
- Suffering on an Existential Level: Here individuals start questioning their existence because they are going through some life events and crises; there they are not able to find any solution, and they start feeling stuck and find themselves in the middle of never-ending suffering and nowhere to go out of it. Here, the person gets disconnected with human feedback loop intelligence and loses the purpose of life.
- Suffering in the Social and Environmental Domains: It is often connected with the person’s worth and surrounding examples: poverty, crises, domestic abuse, and unfair treatment. and this almost happens when we get into a less supportive environment and are excluded from society.
Reasons Why We Suffer
These are the few points that are often our reason behind suffering.
Ignorance:
This often comes from lack of knowledge. We have to understand that nobody can be perfect; in this world, everybody knows something that you cannot. But we get disconnected, and when something wrong happens in the process, that converts into our suffering, and these all happen because we disconnect with our conscious self.
Ego:
Sometimes we take things on our ego so seriously that we block our understanding, and this can become our suffering in the long run, And sometimes, when we are under the influence of our ego, we do not notice things that we should notice to understand the situation better. But our ego makes that our blind spot, and we think we are right, but in the process, we lose the importance of information and make half-truths result, which later may become our suffering.
Attachment:
Attachments are like two sides of the same coin; when people get attached to you too much, you lose value, and when people are running from you there, you want them, and these all happen due to human behaviors that are designed to be like that: we run behind things, and when you get them, we don’t want them any more and again start. And in the process, we create suffering for ourselves because when you don’t have something, you are thinking about it all the time, and when you have things, then you are thinking about other things. We lose the present moments of our life, and this most often causes our suffering to become
Fear of Death:
Fear of death is our life truth, and most people don’t understand or forget that, but in the process of birth and death, we get so evolved and start creating suffering around them and forget that our life is in between two lines, and that’s called birth and death. Our life should be like a journey of joy and experiences, but in the process, we forget the truth and get so attached to material things in fear of losing them, and this way, we often create suffering.
How Do Deal with Suffering?
Recovering from suffering can take time, and approaches can be multiple. Here, we will look at some strategies that we can apply.
1. Work on Your Ego
Oftentimes, under the influence of our ego, we create so many blind spots in our lives that, after making mistakes, we don’t understand that these are all the byproducts of our action. But as we realize who we are, our ego gets disconnected, and you realize that going is the way to know and understand things, then tackling suffering becomes easy and you can easily look upon your blind spot. When you surrender yourself to outer reality, then you have to just go through experiences where you realize who you are and get totally disconnected with your egoness and create space to know the truth, and eventually, if you know the reason behind your suffering there, you can look for the possibilities and work on it.
2. Acknowledge
When you look for the reason behind your suffering and recognize and feed the right knowledge on it, overcoming becomes easy. When you know this is creating suffering in my life, you ask questions about the situation and look for knowledge about what needs to be done. Over time, you see the suffering part becoming a calm and relaxed moment of your life
3. Positivity
When you surround yourself with positivity, you can disconnect with suffering because you can give more focus to your actions and solutions. When you have targeted time, you look for the solution and in the process of recovering, you can easily connect with that activities that can bring you joy and fulfilment in your life.
4. liberate yourself
When we look at suffering from a spiritual perspective, we find that we are not the body and not the mind. This allows us to liberate your thinking and experience of your life, and when you start implementing in your life, you will see suffering start disappearing when you know your time is limited on this planet you are here to experience, or when you start diverting your life from there, you are feeling stuck to open and living the life, then you can easily get disconnected with the materialistic lifestyle and can focus on your happiness and the experience of your life.
5. Stay Healthy
Suffering can also be a part of your body, and here, becoming and maintaining a healthy body becomes very important, and for this, exercising and eating habits have to be done in a proper manner. Your body knows what needs there; you have to be just observant enough to feel the need, and just you have to do that thing, and you will see that your body’s suffering will get gone.
If illness is part of suffering, then you have to take care with proper guidance, and some places you can not do anything; you just have to have patience and go through the recovery process
6. Educate Yourself
Some suffering becomes part of our emotion; here, the reason could be suffering due to a heartbreak in your relationship or coming from rejection from any area of your life. Here, we have to understand that every individual works on a different frequency in their life, and this all happens due to the information and knowledge you have gained throughout your life. When you know this, you can easily educate them on the reason behind the suffering and look for possibilities. Remember that you cannot force anybody to like you, so be yourself, and people will start liking you.
7. Realize that Nothing Lasts Forever
We often get stressed when we face change in our lives, but we have to understand that change is the only stage of our lives where we can develop our next level of thinking and understanding and also develop a new level of problem-solving skills, which is very important for your growth. Change also comes to give us some further information, but we often get discouraged in front of change. We don’t take it positively but also try to put it into negative emotions. Yes, at first it will make you uncomfortable, but as you adapt, you will see that this is for my growth. Or even if you are going through hardship during change, one thing we should never forget is that nothing lasts forever. So keep going and work on the possibilities where you can. Your time will pass, your suffering will pass, and on the other side, you will be a different and new version of yourself.
Final Thoughts
No matter in which area of your life you are feeling suffering, we must understand that suffering is our self-made creation, and if it is our self-made, we are much more capable of looking for solutions as well. For this, you have to be present with pain and the right knowledge to deal with any kind of suffering in your life, and when you follow these steps with conscious attempts, you can easily deal with it.