Necessary and Unnecessary Suffering
How you experience challenge is defined by your relationship to pain.
Let’s break it down.
Pain is reality
I’m sorry to say that no amount of spiritual evolution spares us from it. Realized people, great masters, and saints know this intimately.
Trying to argue with it, avoid it, prevent it, medicate it, spiritually bypass it, or otherwise distract yourself from it only makes pain louder and more unbearable.
This dance can take us into really controlled and rigid spaces in ourselves in order to uphold our divisive idea that we can somehow outsmart it, and it also keeps us feeling separate from the Divine. Because in these actions, we are communicating that we think we know better than God.
To accept reality is to accept that pain is part and parcel with being in a human body. In fact, this is what distinguishes our physical human life from our energetic/spiritual soul life. So long as you’re in a body, pain cannot be escaped. At least not forever.
There are two types of pain.
The first type of pain is caused by unnecessary suffering. Unnecessary suffering is pain you create by being in denial of reality. Denial of reality is when we want things to be some other way than how they are. We get resentful, frustrated, attempt to manipulate circumstances (or people) to make them some other way, and exhaust ourselves in the process.
Gasp! But Antesa, I don’t manipulate!
I assure you, yes you do. Until we learn otherwise, most of us manipulate through our reactive behavior. We avoid, control, argue, fight, defend, justify, attempt to reason, come up with clever comebacks, complain, gossip, energetically shield ourselves, give the silent treatment, hide behind some mask of “clarity” that isn’t really clear, use fancy spiritual vernacular to gaslight and deflect, and on and on, all to avoid taking responsibility for our internal experience and where we are in denial of reality.
Until you learn to accept reality, you will be caught in the trap of attempting to outrun the pain of unnecessary suffering. Evolution is your birthright, but this singular thing will stall your evolution.
The second type of pain is from necessary suffering. Necessary suffering is the pain we learn to feel as we embrace reality. It’s the pain of healing old wounds instead of dancing around them. And we can’t start feeling and metabolizing this pain until we first get so tired of the unnecessary suffering that we get desperate. I don’t know why it’s like this, but it is. Desperation seems to be a spiritual /emotional prerequisite to true healing.
Some people call this an “ego death” and for most of us, this isn’t just a one-and-done deal. For however many rigid, false ideas we have about life, this is how many times we’ll be humbled by the pain of necessary suffering.
I call this “being in the fire,” where everything you thought you were burns, and all that’s left is who you truly are. Over and over again until your physical self is vibrating at the same frequency as your soul. This fire can be brutal, depending on how resistant we are to feeling this particular flavor of pain.
Metabolizing pain is the key here, and we cannot metabolize what we cannot bear to feel. We also cannot feel what we aren’t aware of.
Fortunately, life is literally designed to help us become more aware. First and foremost through the quality of our relationships.
Here’s a good litmus test:
Do you feel totally satisfied with your life, and your relationships? Are you capable of seeing and loving the people in your life exactly as they are? Do you see and love yourself for exactly as you are? Do you feel totally free to be yourself no matter who you’re with or where you are?
If you answered no to any of these questions, Perhaps now is a good time to change that?
