His Holiness the Dalai Lama often talks to me about pain and suffering, but he doesn’t use the terms interchangeably. On the contrary, he teaches that they exist together in the following way:
Suffering = pain x resistance
Pain can be physical or mental, and happens to you because of an outside stimulus—you slam your hand in the car door by accident, say, or (just hypothetically) read a thoughtless criticism from a reader about your latest column. By contrast, suffering is the struggle that ensues when you experience pain. The formula above says that suffering is your pain multiplied by your resistance to that pain. There are thus two ways to suffer less: Either you can try—fruitlessly, as long as you are in this mortal coil—to eliminate pain, or you can lower your resistance to pain when it inevitably comes.
Lowering your resistance to pain is a mysterious idea. To Buddhists, resistance means indulging in fear, anger, or self-pity when people feel pain. When defined this way, we know that resistance heightens our suffering. That’s one reason why people who wallow in self-pity after a breakup tend to move on more slowly from their old relationship.
Resistance means something like “railing against our pain.” Nonresistance, on the other hand, means accepting some pain without fear, anger, or self-pity. The pain just is.
His Holiness teaches that, in many instances, the right approach is to work more on the resistance side than the pain side, so that your suffering falls and your well-being stays high, despite a painful emotion or experience.
That, in fact, is how you know you’re doing it right: when your pain is high, but your suffering is not.
Does this sound inaccessibly Eastern to you? It shouldn’t, because you can find examples of this all around. In my family, for example, two of my three adult kids are U.S. Marines. One is currently active duty (my daughter, who is a second lieutenant). She’s four feet, eleven inches, and the notoriously brutal Marine training has inflicted mental and physical pain on her beyond anything she ever experienced. But her suffering is actually very low, because she has learned not to resist that pain. It simply happens to her, and she has no self-pity that this is so.
Of course, nonresistance is easier when you volunteer for pain, as my daughter did. The real skill in life is nonresistance when you don’t invite it, physically or emotionally. One way I’ve gotten better at this is through my morning prayer, in which I ask for whatever the day will bring—including the parts I don’t like. Without submitting to the divine will, I’d be more prone to rail against the painful parts of my day. Instead, my prayer helps me to accept these parts.
very true