Pain...Suffering optional...from TAD

 Pain happens to all of us, but suffering is what happens when you take that pain and build a story around it. This is in no way denying that traumatic events occur. But when you take the pain and trauma and use it to form an identity, you create suffering for yourself. Pain can be physical or psychological. You may have sustained an injury, or had a crime perpetrated against you. You may have experienced the death of a loved one, or a broken relationship. You may have been treated unfairly at work, or by friends/society. Illness, loss, accidents, crime, death - with any of these events, you experience pain. Accept what happens because you cannot change it after it occurs; you experience the pain, and you take any constructive actions you can to address the situation. You learn, you grieve, and you heal. But whether you suffer or not is your choice. Suffering is often easier to see in other people. We all know someone who clings to something that happened in the past and makes it "who they are." They take the pain of an event and turn it into an identity, and this "mind-made suffering" can last weeks, months, years...even a lifetime. It is harder to see in ourselves, but we can do so with mindful investigation. The more you become aware of these habits of the mind, the more you realize that even though pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.