Pain is Inevitable, Suffering is Optional

Pain is part of life. It does not have to rule your life. Suffering, is not part of life. We do it to ourselves. When it comes to how we respond to physical and emotional pain, we have a choice Life happens, right? We lose jobs, we may lose a home, we get sick, we break bones, and unfortunately people die on us. This is all a part of life, no mater how hard we try to avoid it. And guess what, it hurts. I'm not going to try to convince you of otherwise. When we feel this type of pain, it is what we call an appropriate emotion, which is an appropriate response to life events that hurt. If you stand back from it and cast a critical eye over your life, you will find that these events, thankfully, do not occur that often (hopefully). We can’t choose whether or not we’re going to experience pain. But we can choose to let go and not to fight against it or become overly attached to it and wallow. Is this easy? Of course not. However, it is absolutely possible. By adjusting our thinking, and how we think about our thinking, we can change our emotional responses, the extent to which we suffer (or not), our level of tension and stress, and in turn, our experience of pain.