Pain vs Suffering

Do you know the difference between pain and suffering? Do you know which one you'd choose?

Pain is the feeling of unpleasant physical sensations or emotions. Suffering is the struggle, denial, worry, regret, indignation, complaining, and self-pity wrapped around pain.

Lets understand

There’s physical pain, of course. But there’s also mental and emotional pain. Just as physical pain is designed to notify us when something is wrong, so is emotional pain.

emotional pain is our brain’s way of telling us that something important needs to be addressed. But the emotional discomfort we feel often drives us to find ways to avoid it or ignore it. Rather than look at the underlying causes for our pain, we choose to focus on the unpleasant way it makes us feel.

Sometimes we get caught up in negativity and complaining when we spend too much time focusing on the source of our pain. We can let anger overtake us at the unfairness of our situation. Maybe we dwell on how hard things are for us.

Unfortunately, these reactions only prolong the pain—and create suffering. For this is what suffering is. When we ignore our pain and get angry about it, we allow suffering to invade our lives. We create suffering in our lives by what we do with the difficulties we encounter.

Many people will do anything they can to avoid dealing with their emotional pain. They try to silence their emotions with food, alcohol, drugs, sex, or work. When uncomfortable feelings pop up, they run away from them and resist them.

There is a Cure

But we can learn to stop suffering when we actually choose to stay open to our pain and carefully listen to what it is trying to tell us. We don’t have to let our pain make us angry. We don’t have to expend negative emotional energy trying to avoid it.

Instead, we can learn to observe our pain, examine our expectations and beliefs, and choose to believe that it will pass. Training ourselves to realize that emotions are fleeting and temporary is an important step in saying no to suffering.

Like anything in life, it’s not a once-and-done change. Altering your perspective on the pain you experience and what you do with it is an ongoing journey. It takes practice. As you go through different painful situations and experiences, you may need to go deeper into analyzing your reactions. As with any skill, the more you practice, the more skilled you become.

Final Note

You can end your suffering by overcoming your pain, like fear, shame, guilt, frustration with courage, and taking bold steps, you need to do things which is need to be done, whatever it takes, take risks in your life to overcome your pain, this will end all your suffering caused by this pain. Pain is good as it gives us hints and reminds us things need to be done but suffering is bad, to avoid this pain we praise suffering, which eats all our precious time of life, in which we can do something meaningful and grow in life with our full potential.

Yours Introvert to Super Successful Mentor

Gaurav Vaishnava