Episode # 28- The Cause of your Suffering

In this episode I talk about the cause of your suffering and how to eliminate it!  The concept is straightforward, and it comes from this formula: pain x resistance = suffering.  

Pain is part of life, but suffering is optional.  And suffering is amplified by the amount of resistance we have.  

Listen for examples of resistance and how to decrease your resistance by acceptance.

 

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Transcript-Automatically Generated:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind, episode 28, The Cause of Your Suffering. In this podcast, we learn to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.
Become Unstoppable Body and Mind.
Hello, my friends. Today, we are going to talk about the cause of your suffering and how to eliminate your suffering. Now, if you're thinking, you don't know me, you don't know what the cause of my suffering is.
And it's true, I may not know the specific examples in your case unless you work with me as your coach. And then we can go through this specifically for you. But in general, I can tell you what causes suffering and how to stop it.
I think I talked about this equation in the episode about clean pain versus dirty pain. But in Buddhism, they have an equation that pain times resistance equals suffering. The first point that I want to make is that pain is a normal part of life.
I believe that about 50% of life is positive and about 50% is negative. And in that negative part, there is pain. There's mental pain, emotional pain, or physical pain that's kind of just part of life.
We should expect that that's there because if we didn't feel those negative emotions, we wouldn't even know what positive emotions are. We wouldn't have that contrast. And remember, pain actually does serve us.
If we have physical pain, that can warn us of danger. If we have emotional pain, it might signal that we need to make some kind of a change in our lives. If you think about all of the things that were invented in the world, it's because we wanted to somehow decrease our pain or we wanted to prevent pain.
The person who invented TVs with remotes wanted to make life a little bit easier, not have the pain of having to get up and change the channel or ask your kids to do it. The people who invented a sleep number bed wanted to decrease the discomfort of having a mattress that's too hard or too soft. Cars, phones, all of the great things that we have in our lives have been thought of by people who wanted to make life easier, make life less painful.
So just realizing that pain is going to happen no matter how much we hate it or don't think it should be there, pain is a part of life. The part that we do have control over in the equation is how much resistance we have to the pain. So if pain times resistance equals suffering, then the more resistance we have to the pain, the more suffering we will have.
If our resistance is zero, then pain times zero equals zero. There's zero suffering. So pain is a part of life, but suffering about that pain is optional.
So if you tell me you have a lot of suffering in your life, then even if I don't know the specifics, I know that you are resisting something. You are resisting some pain. So what is resistance?
What does that look like? It could look like denying what is. It could be wishing things were different.
It could be trying to control things that are out of your control. So that includes other people, acts of God or the universe. Basically anything other than ourselves and our thoughts, if we're trying to control them, can lead to some resistance.
It's like a tightening up. It's like a withdrawing. It's an emotion of fear and of scarcity, and it's uncomfortable.
You could have resistance about things that happened in the past. And this is so, so common, right? When something painful in the past has happened, we have that 2020 vision of the past.
We think we could have done it differently. We should have done things differently. They shouldn't have happened that way.
And these are normal things to feel. Our brain wants to learn from the past and make different changes for the future. But our primal brain also wants to keep us in fear and wants to keep us always on the lookout for danger.
And so we interpret the past through this lens of things have gone wrong. How do we change this for the future? Why did this happen?
And a lot of times blame ourselves. But I really like how Byron Katie looks at the past. She is a lover of reality.
And so whatever the reality that happened, she accepts it. In fact, she says things were supposed to happen exactly that way. We know that because that's how it happened.
So be really careful when you're looking at things in your past. Are you looking at it with a mindset of this is something that I can learn from? Or are you looking at it like this shouldn't have happened?
This is unfair. Why did this happen? I can't accept this.
This was wrong. And that's for sure not easy to do. I can use something that happened to me this week as an example.
I was dropped from my car insurance because of having a couple of accidents. And the new policy that I had to get is significantly more. And so I was going through each of those incidents and thinking of all the things that I should have done differently or that basically it just wasn't my fault.
It was the other person's fault. So I had a lot of resistance. About things that happened in the past that I couldn't change.
And it made me pretty mad. And I definitely spent some time this week suffering every time I would think of the past and how it shouldn't have happened that way. I've heard of this happening a lot when there's a death.
People will say, I should have called to check in on this person, or I should have checked my rear view mirror, or, you know, all of these things that seem so rational. If you look back at the situation, I could have done this differently. But the fact is, in that moment, things happened exactly as they were supposed to.
We know that because that's how it happened. And maybe if that seems too fatalistic for you, then think of it like there were multiple things involved, other people's models, other people's decisions. And if you could somehow make some kind of equation or algorithm out of all of the moving parts and pieces and factors that could not be controlled by me, well, that's how it ended up in that moment of time.
So the more you can let go of things that have happened in the past, the more you can accept that that's the way they happened, and it was for learning or it was for some reason, or maybe that's just how life is, then the less resistance you have to the pain and the less suffering. It doesn't mean that there won't be pain, but you could eliminate the suffering. It's totally what I talked about in the clean pain versus dirty pain episode.
There's some clean pain, and then when you add resistance and their suffering, that's the dirty pain. That's the pain that you're causing yourself. You could have resistance to what is going on in the present moment.
And again, it's like a denial of reality. This shouldn't be happening. I don't like that this is happening.
I can't handle this. I'm too weak. I'm too overwhelmed.
And then often in the present moment, we tend to think of the future and have some thoughts of resistance about that pain in the future. How long will this pain last? What does this mean about what's going on?
So for example, if you hurt your knee and you've had knee pain before, you might think, this is like pain I've had before. And it might mean something about the future. It took me three months to get over this pain before.
So does that mean I'm going to have pain for three months? Did I damage something that is irreparable? Am I going to have to spend a lot of time and money trying to fix it?
Is it possible that I won't be able to fix it and I'll have to live with pain the rest of my life? What if I'm not able to hike the mountain I wanted to hike next year? I mean, our brain can give us endless resistance about things in the future.
A lot of what ifs and worst case scenarios. And part of it is because our brains are designed to like stories and to like having completion of stories. So Brené Brown talks about how there's actually some dopamine that you get when you have something that makes sense to your brain and kind of completes this question in a story form.
So if your knee hurts and you don't have an explanation as to why, your brain goes to work on trying to figure out all of these things, what it could mean, having some kind of story to go along with it that explains it, even if it ends up causing you a lot of suffering. I see a lot of resistance when we reject the emotions that we have. And this ties in so closely with the work on chronic pain and disease.
Dr. John Sarno talks a lot about how trying to repress the emotions that we have that we find unacceptable is actually what causes our physical pain. So one example that I can totally relate to is a new parent with an infant. Of course, you love your child, but there are times that are very, very difficult.
You could be sleep deprived. You might have a cranky child. There are times that you feel less than loving towards your infant, but you don't want to hate your baby.
You don't think that that is something that a parent should do. And of course, deep down, you have love for your child, but there are moments where you might really wish that you didn't have that baby in your life right now. And then when you have resistance to that thought, then you create a lot more suffering for yourself.
And again, with those stories, you kind of try to make it mean something. How could I have a thought that I don't like my infant right now? That's a horrible thing for a new mother or father to think.
That must mean that I'm a horrible person. I really have problems. How could I hate my child?
You don't want to acknowledge that that frustration or regret might be there. And so you stuff it down. You repress those emotions.
You have a lot of resistance. And that can literally cause you to experience pain in your body. That emotion that you're not feeling could show up as pain in your back or pain in your neck or GI issues or autoimmune disorders.
So resistance to the emotions that we have as normal humans that have the whole spectrum of emotions, and sometimes they're not pleasant, can definitely lead to more suffering. When we beat ourselves up, that's another form of resistance that adds to our suffering. And this is, again, a very natural thing that we want to do.
It's normal for our brains to want to go into this critical mode. It almost feels like we're going to be better people if we can just beat ourselves up enough, if we can criticize ourselves enough for our negativity, then that will inspire us to be better people. But in this case, two negatives don't make a positive, two wrongs don't make a right.
So when we tend to layer on the negativity on top of what we're already feeling, that's a good example of resistance that leads to suffering. So be on the lookout for times that you guilt yourself for feeling guilty or you're angry at yourself for feeling angry, or you feel ashamed that you have so much shame. Realize this is your primitive brain in its default mode.
So nothing's wrong with your brain when this happens, but we're going to try to evolve our brains here to be the watcher of what's going on, to notice it, to press pause, to see what is really happening, and to make different choices and think thoughts on purpose. So be on the lookout for this. It can happen with emotional pain.
It can happen with physical pain. It can happen where there is some emotional pain, and then you add resistance to it, and then the suffering ends up being a physical manifestation of that pain. Our emotions cause physical changes in our bodies.
Think of crying. There's something physical that happens in response to an emotion, and it can happen just the same way with chronic pain and disease. So what are the causes of your suffering?
Think about how you suffer in your day to day life, and then think about the resistance that could be causing that suffering. Remember, if the resistance is zero, you can still have pain, but the result, the suffering, will be zero. And if you would like more help with this, with your specific examples of your life, because often we have blind spots to ourselves, it's easier to see in other people how they have resistance, but it's sometimes hard to see in ourselves.
But if you're looking to dive deeper, to evolve your brain, to uplevel your life, then check out my website, bodyandmindlifecoach.com, where you can sign up for a free consult call with me, and we can talk about specifically in your life, how this applies to you. And if you've been enjoying this podcast, please go over to iTunes, give it a quick rating that can take just 30 seconds or less. And if you can carve out just a few minutes of your time, please leave a review too.
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