Category Archives: Grief

The crucial difference between pain and suffering.

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Purple heart-shaped prickly pear leaf

“Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.” This statement drives my clients bananas, and not in a good way.

After giving you three ways and then three more ways crappy theology might be causing you to suffer, I want to be clear about how I understand the difference between suffering and pain.

Many theological, spiritual, life-coachy teachers use them interchangeably. I wish they wouldn’t. There is absolutely nothing redeeming about suffering except that maybe eventually we get tired of it and we learn how not to do it.

Pain, on the other hand, can be the beginning of healing.

Pain is what you feel when you hit your thumb with a hammer—nerves fire and send distress signals to your brain to activate your body’s healing response. Suffering is when you call yourself an idiot because you hit your thumb with a hammer.

Pain is the elemental grief you feel when your mother dies, and you miss her bodily presence in the world. Suffering is the sludge you begin to swim in when you think she shouldn’t have died, or that she did dying wrong.

Pain is what you feel in your knee when bone rubs against bone. Suffering is when you think you shouldn’t have arthritis in your knee, or that you caused the arthritis in your knee, or that people who have arthritic knees are old and useless.

Pain and suffering feel different in your body. Pain opens you up and moves through you, making you bigger in the process. Pain is time-limited. It rises and subsides. Suffering closes you down and shrinks you, and it can hang around for decades, until you finally see it for the choice it is and do the work to release it. (Want to explore this together? Contact me here to schedule.)

Pain is creative and healing. Suffering is victimhood and it will kill you.

Pain opens you up for rebirth, for the next stage, iteration, creation of who you are becoming. Suffering keeps you stuck and stagnant and refusing to ride the holy wheel of change. Too bad, because resistance to change is ultimately futile. Change is the way of the universe, and refusing to go along with the divine program will only cause you to suffer.

Pain is a human response to something outside of us—aging, death, illness, loss, injury. Suffering we do to ourselves.

One Buddhist term for suffering is the “second arrow.” The first arrow strikes us from outside. We shoot the second arrow ourselves, at ourselves.

My dad’s fatal accident and my mom’s too-young cancer death were painful. They came from outside of me and were events over which I had no control. But I caused my own suffering when I made these circumstances mean things about me and about the nature of God. When I made them mean that I was expendable and didn’t deserve love, and that the Universe is capricious and cruel, I was causing myself suffering.

Their deaths were the first arrow. I didn’t know that all I needed to do about their deaths was grieve them. To feel the incredible loss, and to explore the contours of these new holes in my heart. My only job was to feel the pain, and to heal.

What sane alternative do any of us have to events outside our control that cause us such pain? Resisting reality causes suffering. Judging ourselves causes suffering. Shooting that second arrow into ourselves causes suffering.

Go ahead and feel the pain, knowing it will pass. Your heart is big enough, I promise you. 

Pain heals you. Suffering only keeps you in hell.

A few resources:

Here’s Buddhist psychotherapist Dr. Tara Brach on the subject of pain and suffering: https://www.tarabrach.com/the-dance-with-pain/

Practitioners of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) call suffering “dirty pain.” In this Unf*ck Your Brain podcast episode Kara talks about the difference between clean pain and dirty pain, and how to get yourself out of dirty pain. https://unfuckyourbrain.com/clean-v-dirty-pain/

Photo by Sarah Wolfe on Unsplash

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Safety is a feeling, not a fact.

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Bare feet overlooking the Grand Canyon

This week’s newsletter is the “to be continued” from last week’s story about my dad’s accidental death, my grief, and our Grand Canyon pilgrimage. (You can read last week’s newsletter here. Thank you for your many responses and well-wishes!)

Friends, I did not get to sit with my brother where he deposited my dad’s ashes 41 years ago. Here’s why. The road out to South Bass trailhead goes through the Havasupai Indian Reservation. The Havasu, like many Tribes, have been decimated by COVID and have closed all access. When we arrived at the boundary between the Park and the Reservation, we found a locked gate. My brother, who’s not in the best of health, and my sister-in-law stayed behind while Jed and I resorted to Plan B – a short hike down the Grandview trail, a trail I hiked many times in my youth with my dad.

I thought I was going to the Canyon to be with my dad and say good-bye. It turns out the Canyon was calling me home to myself.

I hiked in the Canyon (no one native to northern Arizona calls it the “Grand Canyon”) with my dad at least two or three times a year throughout my teens.  As I remember, those hikes were long, hot, dusty, and beautiful, but not hard.

Outside the Canyon, my teenage years were hard. My parents divorced when I was twelve, which meant the loss of more than a family. My mom then married a man who consistently and intentionally violated my body’s boundaries and was emotionally abusive to me. My alcoholic dad also remarried, three more times.

But I was still okay. I handled the bad shit by putting it in a bubble and ignoring it. I was resilient. I had good friends. I was simply waiting out the crazy around me, waiting for my chance to live my own life. I still mostly knew who I was and what I wanted.

My dad’s sudden, random death changed that. It was the final straw. I finally lost track of myself that day. I see, in retrospect, that his death destroyed my childish faith in a benevolent Universe.

I began to seek safety above all else.

I’m not alone in seeking safety. Many of my clients strive for safety. They yearn for something different and deeper in their lives. For new countries and old dreams. But they’re smart. They know that renewing their commitment to their lives and their priorities, reclaiming the fierceness and passion they felt as girls and young women, requires change. And change isn’t safe. Telling the truth to themselves and their partners, asking for what they want, will potentially blow their current lives up.

Here’s what I comprehended sitting 1000 feet below the South Rim of the Grand Canyon: I am still that girl who knew who she was. I am still the strong, capable, smart, resilient girl who loved the rocks and the trees and the birds. That’s true.

And two of the ways I’ve defined myself, as the victim of both sexual abuse and cosmic father robbery, are lies. They’re NOT true, and believing them causes suffering.

Yes, those things happened. They happened to me. I did not choose them. I did not control them. And, although I didn’t know it, what I’ve made them mean all these decades was actually within my control and power. What I choose to make them mean going forward is my decision and mine alone.

It turns out this trip was about facing and deconstructing wispy identities that aren’t solid enough to sustain me, and that obscure my integrity.

The Grand Canyon is solid. I was solid. I’m still solid. There’s bedrock in me, as solid and reliable as the Vishnu Schist, the Redwall, the Coconino Sandstone.

But my never-ending search for safety dammed my flow as surely as Glen Canyon Dam has turned the roiling, muddy, floody Colorado into a placid, useful river.

We’re taught to look for safety outside ourselves. Especially as women living in a patriarchy, we’re taught that following the rules and submitting to masculine culture’s expectations will keep us safe.

And then there’s religion. I think traditional religion’s biggest promise is the promise of safety: God has a plan, and It’s all in His hands. Here are the rules that will keep you safe. If you follow the rules, you’ll go to heaven when you die. Etc., etc., etc. (If that’s working for you, rock on!)

But here’s the thing: looking for safety outside ourselves will never work. The world is not safe. We live in time-limited flesh and blood bodies that hit trees, get cancer, or die in a myriad of other ways. If we’re lucky, we finally just wear out. Bad shit happens. All the damn time.

Safety is a feeling, not a fact. Feelings are created by our thoughts. So the only way to feel safe is to think thoughts that create that feeling.

I’m not talking about denial or positive thinking. I’m talking about healing your foundational worldview and seeing the world and yourself differently. I’m talking about Intentionally choosing thoughts that create an authentic feeling of safety. Thoughts rooted in a worldview that makes sense to you, that you actually believe in.

As I sat in my body on a rock below the rim of the Canyon, the same body that last traveled this trail forty-two years ago, I remembered what I used to know: I am strong. I am resilient. I am creative. I can fucking handle anything.

These thoughts are rooted in my deep belief that the world is holy. My body is made of this incredibly beautiful world and will return to it when I die, therefore I’m holy, too.

These thoughts are rooted in my grown-up understanding that to be alive is to change, and change is holy, too.

These thoughts are rooted in my experience. I have handled so much pain, been swaddled in so much joy, and reveled in so much beauty in these sixty plus years. I’ve loved and been loved so deeply. I’ll bet you have, too.

I have grown-up faith in this sustaining, incredibly generous universe.

Want to explore your bedrock, your dams, and your dreams? Reach out here to schedule a free no-obligation conversation. I’d love to connect.

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Photo credit: Barb Morris, 16 April 2021.

Grieve your deaths. Scatter your flowers. Walk away.

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Getting ready to hike the Sierra

As you read this, I’m on a road trip to the Grand Canyon with my husband. I’m going to say goodbye to my dad who was killed in a skiing accident in 1979, when he was 50 years old. I was 21.

My big brother, 25 years old at the time, was with him on that Colorado mountain. My dad, an expert skier, must have crossed his tips while going fast enough that he died from brain trauma when he hit a tree. (Nobody wore helmets back then.)

I never saw his body, which would have been awful, as injured as it was. My mom, from whom he was divorced, wanted to save my sister and me that pain.

No body at his memorial, just an urn of ashes covered by a brocade cloth.

And then my traumatized brother and his friends took my dad’s ashes to the Grand Canyon, where they scattered them on his favorite trail.

My dad was here, and then he wasn’t anymore. My dad was alive, and then he was simply gone. No real goodbye. No closure.

For several years following his death I would catch a glimpse of him – driving a car going the other way, usually.

His death didn’t seem real. It still doesn’t, in some ways. Even now, more than 41 years later, I’m crying as I write this.

This week’s road trip is to close that open loop, finally. Five days on the road for one day on that trail, so I can sit with my sweet brother, for a little while, where he scattered my dad’s ashes.

My family learned from this experience of aborted grief. My mom realized pretty quickly that she’d made a mistake. When my grandpa died a few years later, our first stop after the airport was the funeral home, where my mom watched as we said goodbye to her father’s embalmed body.

And when Mom died a premature death from cancer at 63, my brother and sister and I insisted on an open-casket visitation before the funeral.

Saving someone else from pain, saving yourself from pain, doesn’t work. Open loops are energy drains. Pain avoided inevitably turns into unnecessary suffering. Ungrieved dead loves are burdens you don’t need to carry.

Face your deaths. If it’s a dead person, grieve them. If it’s a dead dream, grieve it. Then cross it off your list.

Grieving what’s dead makes room for resurrection. Holding on to the dead things keeps your heart and hands closed. If your heart and hands are closed, you can’t catch the new thing that wants to be born.

Grieve what’s dead, and move on. As blessed Mary Oliver advises, “Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away. Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.”

To be continued.

Photo credit: An unknown backpacker in a parking lot on the Sierra Nevada Eastern Slope in August of 1972, probably.

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