Suffering

The tool of the divine. 

If you are reading this, you have suffered.

You have suffered physically, mentally, and spiritually because to exist here in reality is to suffer. It isn’t a malfunction in the design. It is the design.

That sentence is where most people get stuck. It is also where most spiritual teaching gets dishonest. When we see or experience suffering, we want the suffering to be an accident, a glitch in the world or our lives, or something a more evolved and benevolent consciousness would have engineered out of existence. 

So we build elaborate explanations for why it shouldn't be here, or why it's someone's fault, or why enough prayer or enough awakening will finally make it stop.

But suffering is not a flaw in the plan. It is a tool of the divine. The one you pay attention to.

What Is Suffering?

Suffering is what it feels like when the fabricated self collides with something it cannot control, cannot explain, or cannot escape. Remove the story we tell about our particular suffering - the diagnosis, the betrayal, the loss, the ache that has a name - and underneath it is something more grounded: friction. The contrast that screams in the face of your expectations.

Suffering comes in an unfathomable number of forms. The body suffers through pain, illness, or injury. The mind suffers through fear, maybe grief, or the relentless loop of thought. The spirit through the ache of forgetting what it is. Many different experiences, but all with familiar causes: your felt experience of limitation. 

I know this friction well. Through what happened to me during my NDE, the physical recovery that continues to this day, and through the expectations held for me based on how I serve humanity. But I do not regret any of it or wish any of it away.

Why Do We Suffer?

Suffering serves a purpose behind the discomfort. It is not secondary to your time here, it is part of what you came here to experience. And there is value in it if you make the effort to look deeper.

Without suffering, there is no opportunity to love someone through it. Charity does not exist without need. Usually created through suffering. Compassion does not exist without pain that you recognize and choose to meet. Finding love for someone amidst suffering, usually relies on the contrast of you not suffering to their suffering. Suffering in others is what gives you a direction to look in. It’s unmistakable, completely recognizable, and offers you an opportunity.

This is true on the personal scale and on the scale of the whole world. The suffering you witness on the news, in your neighborhood, in the person across the table from you is not simply tragedy to be managed or fixed. It exists, in part, so that you can see it, come close to it, and serve the one inside it. Suffering is what turns love from an idea into something you embody.

We Suffer for Each Other

There is a reciprocity here that is easy to miss when you are the one in pain. My suffering serves you. Your suffering serves me. Not because either of us wanted it, and not because it is fair. But because your suffering has, at some point, opened a door in you that allows someone else's love through it. And somewhere, without your knowing it, your suffering has done the same for another.

We are not suffering in isolation from each other, even when it feels that way. We are suffering for each other, whether or not either party ever finds out.

We Cannot Escape It, and We Cannot Cure It

There is no technique, no belief system, no level of awakening that removes suffering from a human life. We cannot escape it. It is something we agreed to experience here, as part of what life is lived for.

And we cannot cure it. Not for ourselves, not for each other. What we can do is something bigger than curing suffering: we can be love for each other through it. Not fix it. Not rationalize it away. Not rush someone past it toward a lesson they haven't finished learning. Just be love, present, alongside the suffering, while it does what it was intended to do.

Frustration In Suffering

There is probably a part of you, the part still bargaining with the pain, maybe still standing beside the hospital bed, or replaying the phone call triggering your suffering, that hears "suffering serves a purpose" and feels something closer to frustration than comfort. 

That part of you is not wrong to feel resistance. It is ok not to hear any of this as comfort. My intention in writing this post is not to offer it as comfort. I write it offering it as truth. Truth is sometimes the harder thing to receive. You do not have to feel better about your suffering today for there to be truth. You only have to let the possibility sit next to the pain.

The Portal

Suffering is not just a burden to be carried. It can be a portal to greater understanding.

The suffering you cannot make sense of right now, from where you're standing, is part of a bigger plan that cannot be seen by the person suffering. This is one of the greatest truths about your existence. You are not meant to see the whole design from inside the pain. That would defeat the purpose. You are meant to move through it, and in moving through it, to become someone who can love in a way that you couldn't before.

Suffering, when seen in this way beyond material reality, stops being the enemy. It becomes the tool you recognize that the divine uses to carve out more room in you for love. The very thing you were sent here to remember to become.

Tomorrow Is A New Day

So what does all of this actually ask of you tomorrow? Not to fix someone's pain, and not to serve up a philosophy to explain it to them. It asks something bigger: to sit with them without flinching. To stay in the room a bit longer than is comfortable. To let their suffering be real instead of a problem to be managed. To let your presence be the offering, not your advice, not your explanation, not your urgency to make it stop. That is what it means to be love through someone else's suffering. It might not look like much from the outside. But it is everything on the inside.

You have suffered. That is not evidence that something went wrong. It is evidence that you are exactly where you agreed to be. Love yourself for experiencing it.