LOVE CONTAINS BOTH JOY AND SUFFERING
What is suffering if not that which
draws us to seek what is truly beyond suffering?
What is joy if not a taste of liberation?
What is love if not the container that holds both
and knows that in the sacred dance of life,
either can bring us home?
To be human is to know both joy and suffering. While it is natural to prefer our joys, our sufferings often deepen our insights, increase our compassion, or lead us beyond whom we thought we were. Our difficulties do not necessarily arise from either pain or pleasure but from being stuck in one place or another. We may clutch so tightly to pleasure that, in the fear of losing it, we destroy the joy we might have known. Or we may struggle so fiercely against our pain—armoring ourselves against it, or raging at it, or judging ourselves unworthy because of it—that we increase our suffering. Yet joy and suffering are simply changing faces of a love that calls us to go beyond our limited definitions of who we are, a love that points us toward one seamless reality that embraces both.
One of the thorniest questions in spirituality, religion, or human experience is the question of suffering. We cannot reconcile in thought the question of suffering, although there are many theories, many views of suffering. Here are just a few:
Suffering is inevitable. “The world is full of suffering,” observed the Buddha in his first Noble Truth.1 Birth, old age, sickness, and death are suffering. Suffering is created by attachment and aversion.
Suffering is illusion. The eldest son of the Tibetan teacher Marpa was killed, and Marpa was spotted weeping in grief by one of his students, who then questioned Marpa’s teaching that everything is illusion. “Yes,” Marpa replied, “everything here is illusion. And the death of a child is the greatest of these illusions.”
Suffering is redemptive. In the Christian view, suffering can be redemptive. Jesus suffered on the cross to redeem the world; and one’s own suffering, if joined with his, is sometimes viewed as “coredemptive.”
Suffering is punishment for sin. Many believe illness, loss, and poverty to be punishments for sin.
Suffering is karma. This view is similar to the previous one, but with the addition of a belief in past lives that determine the experiences in the current life. Here the view is that suffering is karma, punishment for sins from past lives.
Suffering is transformative. Rumi’s poem “Chickpea to Cook” (see chapter 10) is a tale of suffering being the agent of transformation to a new life. Suffering may serve the transformation of our ignorance into true understanding.
Suffering is grace. Martin Buber, the Jewish theologian, said, “All suffering prepares the soul for vision.” In this sense, suffering is seen as grace, a gift; and it is the case that many who experience misfortune do not seem to be suffering, but continue praising the Divine for all moments.
The limitless One is suffering. Whoever sees that all is One—by whatever name—holds that it is the limitless One who suffers with us, as us, yet simultaneously is free of suffering. So it is the suffering Buddha or the suffering Christ that is seen.
VIEWPOINTS ARE IDEAS
Suffering has also been imagined to be a choice, an accident, the result of an unjust society or poor parenting. But the one thing all of these viewpoints have in common is this: They are all ideas! You may hold to one or more of them, but understand that each one is an idea. Each believes it points to a truth about suffering. Each view may also have evolved from experience. Yet in holding our viewpoints as “truth,” we may miss the deeper truth that each of us is simply a “viewing point” of the Infinite.
SUFFERING COMES WHEN WE PUSH PAIN OUT OF OUR HEART
Pain is inevitable in a human life, but suffering occurs when we push our pain out of our hearts, out of our loving awareness, imagining it speaks about our lack of worthiness. When pain is judged, we increase our pain. The body may be in pain, but it is often our beliefs that add suffering. When pain is touched by the experience of love, however, it is frequently transformed. Someone simply being deeply and compassionately present in the face of your suffering can bring comfort. There is also your own compassionate and warm heart that can pour its love into the places of pain in your body or mind.
Sometimes the reasons for suffering seem apparent, but often suffering is a mystery. So is love. Yet no matter how we view suffering, no matter what spiritual traditions might speak of it or in what ways, most seem to agree that suffering is deeply healed by love.
Suffering and pain are not necessarily the same. And many of us suffer greatly for such things as not getting somewhere fast enough in our automobiles or not liking the weather or having to wait for our child or our spouse to get ready to go somewhere and it is taking “too long.” We suffer when we refuse life as it is.
WHEN TRUTH FEELS UNCOMFORTABLE
Most of us are happy to be touched by the truth of joy, goodness, happiness, love, peace—moments when truth feels comfortable. But what happens when we find ourselves face-to-face with the truth of the shadow in ourselves or in our world? Do we stop wanting truth when that truth feels dark, hidden, uncomfortable, confusing, or painful?
When our desire to know truth becomes greater than our desire to appear a certain way to others or ourselves, the Truth within begins to reveal itself. On the way to discovering the Truth about our essence, we begin to see with greater clarity our own places of holding, of suffering, of attachment to ideas about how life should look or how we should look. Sometimes it can be a painful process to see the truth about our defenses, our sense of unworthiness, our hidden motivations, our lies. Yet when Truth is what we want, the light of Truth comes to illumine whatever lies in the shadow.
What has been hiding in the shadows, fearful of being seen? Selfishness? Anger? Pain? Power? Exuberance? Sexuality? Neediness? Self-abandonment? Love? Vulnerability? What about ourselves has been pushed out of our own heart? What are we judging should not be here even when it is? What happens when we invite all of life into the light of Truth? We may discover that the place of our greatest fear or our greatest wounding becomes the place where the greatest light will enter to liberate our experiences back into the wholeness of Being.
HEALING INVOLVES OFFERING OUR SEPARATION TO LOVE
Separation is our suffering; judgment is our suffering. Fear is our separation; thinking “I am the doer” is our separation. That separation may be from others or from ourselves, from our bodies, emotions, or the truth of our own experience. We may struggle with certain feelings or situations, imagining they should not be present in our lives, but they are. So what do we do in the face of such judgment? We either deny the truth of the moment, the truth of our own or another’s experience, or we judge one or the other to be unworthy of love.
When you know your Self as the universe and as every moment that unfolds, you understand that your true heart excludes nothing from its love. The body may still experience physical pain, but you are healed of the pain of separation the moment you give your experience to the love in your own heart. Love separates itself from nothing and does not end when people part, nor does it end in the face of so-called death.
The deepest pain comes when we feel disconnected from our true Self, our divine nature. This separation drives all our longings. We suffer every single time we cast ourselves out of our own heart of love. Every single time our fear keeps us from touching what is with compassionate awareness, we are separate. We hunger for love and acceptance but continually stop to dine in the mind of judgment rather than the heart of acceptance.
Nothing is as accepting as our true nature, because our true nature never separates itself from the moment in order to judge it. Only a conditioned mind does that; then thought imagines “it” must learn to accept the moment. Minds “trying” to accept the moment can even believe that this means accepting abuse when everything inside is screaming to get out of a destructive or abusive relationship. We continually look to our conditioned mind to be the agent of acceptance or love. We are looking in the wrong place.
Love dwells in our own heart, and when we begin to discover it there, we begin to see it everywhere. It is what we are when we are not afraid. It is the absence of separation. It is a state that requires no conditions and holds no attachments. Love is our true nature, and our life is its reflection. For our true Self, love is natural, spontaneous, and effortless. What is arduous is seeing clearly the obstacles of conditioning, attachments, beliefs, judgments, and stories that obscure the experience of our Self as love.
Hungry for love, many of us search for crumbs under the table instead of sitting down to the sumptuous feast of life. We grieve for the self we imagine unworthy of love rather than opening to the love we are. We become bitter when the universe (substitute mother, father, friend, spouse, God) doesn’t give us the love we want because we believe love can only come from the places and in the ways we have imagined it. Often, we fantasize that love is a “special” relationship that will meet all our needs and without which there can be no happiness. But happiness arises when we are being love rather than seeking it or demanding it.
LOVE IS KNOCKING ON THE DOOR, WAITING TO BE LET OUT
Even if we feel we are “looking for love in all the wrong places,” we may not know where else to look. Look in your own heart. Love has been there all along, knocking on the door from the inside, waiting to be let OUT. We may have defenses, walls built over time that we imagine are protecting our heart, protecting a “self” from being hurt, protecting ourselves from feeling open and vulnerable, but we may never have inquired whether love needs protection. We look in the world of opposites, the world of duality, for the love we are longing to experience without ever following that longing to its Source. We are love, looking for love, trying to be love worthy. We are the ocean looking for water.
SUFFERING CAN BREAK US OPEN TO LOVE
Suffering is often the very thing that breaks us open. When we are suffering, we are seeking a way out of suffering. When our habitual ways of dealing with inner turmoil no longer work, we may find that our suffering has surrendered us into the arms of a bigger truth, a deeper wisdom, a greater love. Our heart may open, not because we even wished for such a thing, but because it may feel broken, shattered, betrayed, raw, and exceedingly vulnerable. Love may be trying to lay claim on us through our broken heart. And perhaps we will one day be wise enough to let the heart remain open rather than defended, angry, or closed.
Every day, sometimes moment by moment, we refuse love—refuse to give it or receive it. When we withhold it from ourselves, failing to let love touch our own pain, our own suffering, we may also refuse to see suffering in another. Ram Dass and Paul Gorman wrote insightfully in How Can I Help? about the fear some of us have of the compassion in our own hearts. We are afraid to see suffering in the world because we might be moved by the compassion we would feel, and then what might happen? Would we then have homeless people sleeping in our living room? Love seems difficult to touch in the presence of fear, and yet love accepts all, even our fear. In love itself, there is no fear, for there is no separation, no estrangement from our self, no separation from the moment as it appears.
However we view suffering, we might say that love is the answer or at least the response. But what is loving in any given situation? The ego mind often thinks love would be having exactly what it thinks it wants at any given time. But love is not always about getting what we want, as any mother knows who has yanked back her child from running in the street, only to have to comfort him in the midst of tears and fears. Love is not always about comfort, either. There is a greater love than comfort. Rumi points to the paradox in his poem “The Question”: Walking into the “fire” or into the lovely “stream,” we do not know who is blessed and who is not. And yet we may, often in retrospect only, realize that what we imagined was one thing—the blessing or the curse—has shown itself to be the reverse.
WHEN THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING DISSOLVES
Ultimately, the question of suffering will never be resolved in the mind. It is only when the mind is still that the question itself dissolves. In the phenomenal world, all opposites appear: suffering/healing; birth/death; failure/success; poverty/wealth; good/evil; joy/sadness; honor/dishonor; satiation/hunger; hard/soft; sometimes joy, sometimes suffering. Each flows into the other, creating, defining, and disappearing into the other.
BOTH JOY AND SUFFERING CAN RETURN US HOME
There is no experience that cannot return us to our home ground. We are generally quite happy to allow moments of joy to simply BE, and we do not feel the need to inquire into their Source. Yet joy itself, when traced backward, will be found to be arising in the same awareness that is also open to suffering. We might imagine, for example, that the first bite of a delicious chocolate is what brings pleasure, but “pleasure” does not reside in the chocolate. It resides in us. The source of pleasure is within; the experience of pain is within. In spontaneous joy, there is no refusal of the moment. This nonrefusal is the action of our true nature. We discover there is a causeless joy in the Heart of Awareness. And we discover that suffering appears when we feel separated from the truth of who/what we are.
Find what does not appear or disappear and rest there. The phenomenal world, including the life of the body-mind, will continue to come and go, but You will not. You will not abandon yourself in failure or promote yourself in success. You will be content to live your life by “not doing,” yet doing will happen. What arises you will accept, what returns you will accept, including your body-mind’s feelings, actions, and reactions. You will be like the sage, but you will neither need one nor need to be one.
The sage calls dying young a blessing and living long a blessing,
calls beginnings a blessing and endings a blessing. We might
make such a person our teacher, but there’s something the ten
thousand things belong to, something all change depends upon—
imagine making that your teacher!2
CHUANG TZU
The “ten thousand things” belong to what has no name, but the felt sense is an empty awareness that moves as life and love in its own expressions of Being—the living Truth of who you are. When we make that our teacher, we can open to the possibility of receiving grace in even the most challenging moments of our lives.