How can I make the best out of my suffering?

While suffering is never desirable, that does not mean that we can’t make use of it, when it is inevitable, to progress humanly and spiritually. Suffering can provide an extraordinary lesson capable of making us aware of the superficiality of many of our daily concerns, of our own fragility, and, above all, of what really counts deep down within us.

Having lived several months on the verge of death in terrible pain, Guy Corneau, a Canadian psychiatrist, finally “let go.” He stopped fighting a pain that could not be soothed and opened himself to the potential for serenity that is ever present in us.

“This opening of the heart only became more marked in the following days and weeks. I was plunged into nameless beatitude. A vast fire of love burned within me. I only had to close my eyes to partake of it, long and satisfying draughts…. And then I understood that love was the very fabric of this universe, the common identity of each being and each thing. There was only love and nothing else…. In the long run, suffering helps us to discover a world where there is no real division between external and internal, between the body and the mind, between me and others”

We can learn from suffering if we use it wisely. On the other hand, resigning ourselves to it with a simple “that’s life!” is like renouncing from the get-go any possibility of the inner change that is available to everyone and that allows us to prevent suffering from being systematically converted into misery. Just because we are not defeated by such obstacles as illness, animosity, criticism, or bad luck in no way means that events do not affect us or that we have overcome these obstacles forever; it only means that they no longer block our progress toward inner freedom. If we do not wish to be confounded by suffering and we want to put it to the best use as a catalyst, we must not allow anxiety and despondency to conquer our mind. The eighth-century master Shantideva writes: “If there is a cure, what good is discontent? If there is no cure, what good is discontent?”

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