How do you suffer?

An inquiry into the nature of our discomforts

Thinking about therapy? I now have a few spaces for 1:1 work. I combine a diverse training in psychotherapy with a mindfulness perspective and love working with all sorts of folks. You can find out more about my experience and how I work via this post and also on my website. Feel free to reach out directly at jude.integrated@gmail.com for questions and/or a free short exploratory session to see if we’re a good fit.


How do you suffer?

This is not a rhetorical question. Really, how do you suffer?

Usually when I ask this to clients, they respond to a different yet related question: why do you suffer?

That is also a worthy inquiry, but you’ve likely thought some deal about that already. Instead I am asking a very different question. How do you suffer?

Why we suffer has to do the the conditions that we attribute our suffering to. Sometimes we can do something to better these conditions, sometimes we can’t. Either way, much of our suffering can be transformed through the direct investigation into the experience of suffering.

continuing to use photos of flowers that I’ve taken

Insight Transforms Suffering

Buddhism is very much oriented towards working with, and alleviating suffering, and there are many lessons and strategies we can draw from it.

One of the core aspects of Buddhism is called Vipassana, often translated to Insight and conflated with the term Mindfulness. While there are specific traditions that emphasize this style of practice and therefore use the label, Vipassana was a central teaching of the Buddha, and therefore exists in all Buddhist traditions, even if it’s less emphasized (you will hear this term less in Tibetan Buddhism and Zen, though it’s still a prominent principle in those traditions).

The goal of Vipassana or Insight Meditation is to get insight into the true nature of reality. There are a few types of insight we are looking for, and a big one is insight into the nature of suffering.

One of my favourite Insight Meditation teachers, Rob Burbea, clarified what he considers to be an insight:

“Any realization, understanding, or way of seeing that brings, to any degree, a dissolution of, or decrease in, dukkha.” (Dukkha is commonly translated as suffering but also has a quality of dissatisfaction.)

Insight Meditation practice is all about observing our experience in a way that dissolves or reduces our suffering.

This is an incredible claim, that we can reduce our suffering through observation or insight. It’s in stark contrast to our usual way of trying to resolve our suffering; by addressing the conditions or perceived causes.

Exploring the causes of suffering is also important, because sometimes we can address these issues directly.

For example, if I’m working with a client who feels they are being bullied or mistreated, I’d first coach them to learn how to stand up for themselves, to communicate and enforce boundaries better.

Or if a client came to me depressed and anxious because their life felt meaningless, I would start by exploring what they care about, their sense of agency, and what they can actually do to feel they are living more aligned with their values.

The mindfulness approach is not so much about addressing the conditional causes of our individual suffering as much as it is about freeing ourselves from suffering regardless of the conditions.

In this sense the methods are universally applicable. Regardless of your individual conditions, these strategies can help you.

There is, however, a bit of a trap here. If we take this approach to its extreme, we may end up accepting or minimizing conditions that we can and should take action to try to change.

Conditional Wellbeing and Spiritual Bypassing

Some idealistic types can be too focused on the inner work of liberating themselves from suffering and not enough on taking appropriate action. This is what is often meant by the term spiritual bypassing.

But that isn’t to say these techniques don’t have their place. In fact I find them deeply complimentary and sometimes even essential to enacting meaningful change. Often the barriers to taking meaningful action are internal.

Alternatively, sometimes we are genuinely stuck. We are working a stressful job that isn’t aligned with our values, but we don’t have any other options. Or maybe we have chronic pain or illness. Some degree of suffering is always inevitable.

Ultimately this is eloquently addressed in the Serenity Prayer (“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference”).

How We Suffer

Coming back to the question about how you suffer, the goal is to get beyond the story and look at the actual felt sense of suffering.

A natural progression of can go something like this.

Story: I suffer because my life is a mess and nothing feels meaningful.

Then we try to get into the actual feelings. Boiling down the story until we arrive at the unique cocktail of emotions or felt senses. Something like this:

I feel disoriented, lost, impotent, and sad.

This is very important as naming the feelings helps to process or liberate them. It brings them more into conscious awareness, where they can be felt and move more freely.

This movement of feelings is important. The more we can put words to them, the more alive they become within us. Repressing feelings only makes them more stuck. Instead we want to do our best allow them to move through us unobstructed.

We often have a lot of resistance or defences against feeling things fully. These are based in fear. So helping us to understand what are our fears around feeling these things will help us feel safe to feel them.

Non-Identification

One common fear has to do with the way we tend to identify with feelings. For example, if we commonly feel worthless, we may associate the feeling of worthlessness with the belief that we are worthless.

This is a very common mistake we make. So we must practice non-identification; practicing “I feel” statements to replace “I am” statements.

All of this can help us to better feel what’s going on, and practically we are doing this by learning to relax around difficult feelings, as opposed to contracting around them.

Our body instinctively responds to discomfort by tensing up in an attempt to suppress the feelings. Here we are retraining our body to relax around our uncomfortable sensations by reassuring ourselves that we can feel these feelings.

We can further help ourselves to feel safe to feel our feelings by further dropping the stories, context, and labels — and feeling them only as physical sensation.

We may have all sorts of associations with these feelings that make them feel very scary, and so we practice dropping all of this and just be with felt sense only.

This means feeling things like vibration, weight, pressure, texture, and space.

There are many techniques we can use to help this process, but we can emphasize two important principles here.

Sensory Clarity: How clearly can you feel the physical sensations?

And also equanimity.

How much can you welcome the sensations?

Instead of resisting them by tightening up around them, can you relax and just be with the sensations as fully as possible?

It is this simple formula, applied over and over, that begins to transform our moment to moment relationship with suffering, in turn liberating us from our pain and reactivity.

How clearly can you feel your suffering? How fully can you relax, let it happen, and whole heartedly welcome it? Let your pain move through your being unobstructed.

This is in many ways against our nature and counterintuitive, but deeply transformative if we commit to the practice.

(You can check out my Equanimity Playlist for guided meditations and more talk on the power and practice of equanimity.)