Rewriting Our Relationship to Suffering
By Hadi Beyrouti
“Happiness is your nature. It is not wrong to desire it. What is wrong is seeking it outside when it is inside.” –Ramana Maharshi
The search for happiness is a natural impulse. Intuitively, we know that, somehow, happiness is related to the authenticity and reality of our being. At the same time, when any endeavor is undertaken through the will and energy of our egoic consciousness, it leads us further away from the inner longing we are trying to actualize.
Understanding this is simple, as the energy that our egoic consciousness utilizes is the energy of attachment and resistance, or as Patanjali names them, raga and dvesha—two fundamental causes of suffering. The degree to which we resist or grasp is the degree to which we suffer within our experience.
We tend to believe that our suffering stems from our emotions, thoughts, or experiences. That it is caused by the things we lack and our life circumstances. But this illusion has been dispelled by many spiritual masters. They remind us that our suffering derives from our relationship to our emotions, thoughts, experiences, and circumstances. Through this, we can understand the ego as a way of relating to our experience, a relationship based on attachment and aversion.
Have you ever experienced sadness—or any other emotion—without any resistance? Have you noticed the profound peace and release that can be found in such moments? It’s as if a part of us is constantly trying to control, manage, and direct our inner experience—but what we often overlook is that the underlying energy driving this is fear and lack. Fear clings and resists, hindering the natural harmonization of our entire being. This, they say, is suffering.
Embracing suffering means letting go of our resistance to it. As long as we continue to avoid suffering, we won’t have the courage to dip our gaze deeper, and we will remain in the shallow waters of consciousness where the currents of our conditioning only grow stronger. Our beliefs and fears will continue to unconsciously influence every one of our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
There comes a time when this constant running away from ourselves needs to be given up. When the romantic glasses of shallow hope are put away, and we turn towards a part of ourselves that has the depth and power to open our arms and hearts to such a degree that the entire spectrum of our humanity is allowed. For whatever is unconscious keeps us in prison, and what we don’t see, we are the slave of. This surrender is an incredibly humble act, yet it opens us to a majesty beyond belief and description.
We start opening our hearts to the Divine and the body becomes a vehicle of transmutation of personal and collective suffering because we have stopped running away. Our refuge is the essence of all things; it’s the silence that gives birth to unshakable trust. It’s the place where wisdom is born, and love prevails. Here, we find our home, that dimension beyond harm and needs, the nameless eternity that we have always been.
Who would have thought if we allowed what we have been running from, only then would it finally be released?
Remember that your very presence is the place of release and healing, for your presence is—as we have been reminded many times by countless masters—the Divine Truth. And that presence is absolutely free from any aversion to pain or attachment to pleasure.
Here lies freedom.
Hadi is a Hridaya Yoga teacher and frequent contributor to our blog. You can read all of his posts here.
