The Recipe for Suffering

We all have bad experiences. It comes with being alive and aware. We cannot dictate what happens to us. As the wise old saying goes, “Shit happens.” That’s life. 

We can, if we aren’t conscious of it, amplify our pain simply by our misinterpretation of what is happening. It’s a mental process more than anything, and as such, can be a gross distortion of reality. 

Years ago, at a seminar I attended, chiropractic pioneer Donald Epstein shared this: the recipe for suffering. I thought the teaching was brilliant and so I want to pass it on.

The four “P’s” of suffering: How to take a bad experience and make yourself suffer.

Obviously, no one likes suffering. No one likes being so completely entangled in their discomfort that it swamps them emotionally. But we’ve all likely been in that state, and when we were there, we were likely playing out a certain story about our experience and causing further distress because of this. 

Some of you may be doing this right now- spinning a story in your head that consists of one or more of these archetypal “lies” about your condition.

Here they are.

We tell our selves it’s PERMANENT. We decide that this is never going to end. Whatever bad feeling we are experiencing will go on forever; we will always be this miserable. 

In most cases it’s just not true. Even if the conditions are not going to change, we discredit our ability to get used to them. We may not get back together with the person who broke our heart. We might not be able to sew the body part back on. We might not be able to bring back the loved one we lost.

This is true. 

But our ability to contend with such losses grows stronger with each passing day. The nature of our relationship to our loss changes. Pain becomes less sharp and more manageable. We get over it. 

This may not be something a person wants to hear. They may think that “getting over it” implies a lack of love for what is lost. It simply means that we are constantly refining our ability to live with the reality of the loss. Even the most painful, impactful experiences have a kind of half-life- the pain is still there, but it has faded to a point of manageability. If the pain surfaces later on, it comes on less vividly, maybe even less frequently, and we discover that we are more equipped to stand in such experiences more openly. 

“Hello darkness my old friend...”

- Simon and Garfunkel

 There may be a kind of latency to the way pain reasserts itself in our field of consciousness, but this doesn’t prove permanence- only that certain experiences can leave a residue or echo in our body-minds. Even such echoes will be processed with increasing levels of tolerance. This tolerance may not always seem linear though. We may feel like we are backsliding at times but this is likely due to a common fallacious perspective.

I have sometimes joked that the greatest sex is the sex you’re having, or that the best ice cream is the ice cream you’re eating now. You get it. It is the immediacy of what we are experiencing that is always stronger than the memory of something that has already happened. Pain works the same way. Our memory of pain is never as powerful as the pain we are currently experiencing, and so we might misinterpret a current instance of pain as worse than some previous encounter that only lives now as a memory. 

What is important is to watch the changes. This will free you from the illusion of permanence in your condition. You adapt to challenges. You handle pain with increasing grace and fortitude. You take your losses, no matter how unacceptable they may have initially seemed, with expanding levels of acceptance. It’s just what we do. Healing happens- it is a very reliable force of nature and you would do well to recognize this. What was lost may not be regained, but we manage to push forward and work with the loss. The trick is simply too remember this capacity in yourself. 

Even if things do get worse as with some progressive diseases, never underestimate your ability to grow ever more skillful in your ability to work with it. 

Now, I must briefly speak to certain outliers here. Some people might have to contend with such increasing levels of pain that they ultimately decide to end things. It happens. In fact I have a friend who has been asked to accompany her close friend in the conscious decision to end her own life after a long, agonizing bout with a condition that is untreatable and only producing more excruciating sensation each passing day. She is suffering and her pain has a permanence that I do not intend to suggest is illusory. It is a sad reality for her and I cannot fault her for arriving at the decision to initiate her own death. I am not privy to the visceral truth of her pain and make no arrogant claims that she should just try to work with it. There may be a permanence to the pain of certain terminal conditions that cannot be denied. As with most rules, there are exceptions. We could at the very least conceive that death itself is part of the impermanence of things- even if it is self-chosen. 

Let us forget about the extraordinary pain in such cases and focus on what most of us must contend with- those more pedestrian forms of pain that come throughout life: embarrassment, heartache, loneliness, rejection, disappointment, stress, and so on. These are all, by and large, passing, or at least fading in intensity. We amplify our distress when we ignore or forget this truth. We often tell ourselves the opposite simply because we are so entangled in the immediacy of our pain that we cannot see it changing through the passage of smaller durations of time. On a longer timeline, the impermanence becomes apparent. Patience for such insight is important. 

Even if the conditions that cause us pain seem to last, our relationship to such conditions is dynamic. We are constantly moving to greater states of wholeness even within our brokenness. When you realize this, bad experiences will have less of a charge in the long run and suffering is remarkably diminished.

The second lie we tell ourselves is that we are POWERLESS, that is, that there is nothing we can do about our condition. This is largely illusory. There is always something we can do to ameliorate some of our distress even if it is not readily apparent what that actually is. 

In the case of the person I mentioned earlier, with the terminal and and painful condition, her decision to take her own life is in a certain regard a conscious act of self-empowerment. Not that I would suggest such actions be entertained in regards to your own pain, only to point out that there is almost always something on can do to cooperate with one’s situation even if it means death.

In a less lethal response, we can usually just redirect our attention to something less painful or take some tangible step to make thing more tenable. We can take a pill or get a surgical procedure. We can change jobs, move out, get a lawyer, take karate, change our diet, go for a run, adopt a pet, dance in our bedroom. Each circumstance will have its own unique palate of possible responses but it is important to ask oneself, “What can I do to work with this?” 

You may not be able to get the outcome you want, but you can likely create an outcome that is considerably more tolerable.

Many people get stuck here. They simply lock into the false belief that they are helpless. They will complain inwardly and outwardly and in doing so, fortify the walls of their own cage. Catch yourself lapsing into this story when it happens. There are always doorways to a more empowered relationship to one’s condition. You may not have the power to generate your most preferred resolution, but you have some power. You have some agency. Suffering arises when we miss this. 

The third lie is that we tell ourselves it’s PERSONAL. We assert that the universe or some person has us in the crosshairs for torment. We esteem ourselves to have been singled out for punishment by some invisible forces of motivation that actively want us to hurt. 

“Why me?” is the cry of a person entangled in this illusion. 

Our pain often feels personal because we experience it through the centrality of our own perspective, but this is only an impression. Again, shit happens. There maybe certain consequences we must face due to something we have done, but this need not be couched in any sense that this process is unique or special to us. We certainly may have to go through it alone. We may have to answer to what is happening as an individual, but we do not need to take it personally. Sometimes bad things happen and we just happen to be the person it happens to. Once you put your sense of self in the center, you exacerbate the pain by asserting that it’s a special fate reserved just for you. Recognize yourself as the witness to your pain rather than the target of it, and you can process it all with greater poise. De-center yourself from the drama and you can answer to it with greater wisdom. 

Remember that people have been experiencing horrible stuff as long as humans have existed. It’s just how life works. It can’t just be puppies and rainbows for all of us all the time. There are challenges to be faced. Don’t take it personally. Just accept that it is all happening and go from there.

End of story.

The last “P” in the suffering experience is not a belief so much as it is a matter of co-opted attention. We take the bad experience and we make it all-PERVASIVE, that is, we amplify it so much in our consciousness that we cannot see the other things occurring outside of it. We are blind to the beauty going on around us because we become so fixated on what is immediately afflicting us.

Imagine a child going to Disneyland and melting down because they didn’t win a teddy bear, or their ice-cream got dropped, or they couldn’t go on a certain ride. There they are in the magic kingdom, a place that almost any human would find laden with countless dazzling sights and experiences, and all they feel is their disappointment at some minor detail. We might shake our heads at such fragility, but many of us do this with our own unpleasant experiences. We fail to see the sunshine and beauty around us. We miss the ordinary, precious reality that our bodies are more or less healthy, that we have access to food and water, a roof over our heads, and that by and large things are still pretty good. 

This is what it means to make our problems all-pervasive. This is not to suggest that we should just bypass the gravity of our situation. We need not be disingenuous, declaring “It’s all good.” We simply need to keep things in perspective. A bad experience can become in our minds like a kind of psychological black hole, swallowing any vestiges of light and goodness in its gravitational field. Recognize this tendency in your own thinking and you can give yourself an immediately larger space in which to stand and operate. Your experience might still suck royally, but it’s not the whole picture. Don’t make it so. 

That’s the teaching. The four “P’s”: Permanent, powerless, personal, and all-pervasive. 

Invariably your mind will be involved in your perceived problems and pain. There’s no way around it. The game is to use your mind to find constructive ways to optimize your outcomes rather than slamming the cage door on your own sense of strength, agency, and resiliency. Should you find yourself lost in the thicket of your own suffering, take a deep breath and check in. Have you been nurturing any of these perspectives? Take a break from arguing them in your head, or better yet, find evidence of the opposite. Sure, admit your pain but go easy on calcifying it into a story that leaves you believing you are stuck, powerless, and condemned. Practice doubting your own beliefs- especially when they mire you the swamp of your own afflictions. You don’t have to deny what is happening, just question those interpretations that inhibit moving forward with your head held high. You are powerful beyond measure even if you occasionally forget it. Just come back to the open space of experience, feel your feelings, and do what you have to do. 

End of story.