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Pain in life is unavoidable.  The pain of being rejected or betrayed, losing an unborn child, losing hope in a dream, missing out on a career opportunity or even of just having your youngest child head off to school or college.  Suffering, on the other hand, is something distinctly different as it is something we bring on ourselves.  We do this when we refuse to legitimize or over-legitimize our loss.  
 
Denying Legitimacy:  When we deny or discount a loss it keeps us from experiencing joy. Why?  Because when we refuse to feel pain, when we deny our sadness or simply try to numb it, it truncates our capacity to feel its direct opposite, to truly know joy. 
 
Our western cultures’ growing aversion to feeling sadness (or any unpleasant emotion) has taken the innate ’seek pleasure/avoid pain’ drive to new levels. But it has done so a steep price: missed opportunity to find meaning in life, to feel compassion, to know the joy we all crave and to evolve in our own humanity.   Emotions are a continuum of highs and lows - if we cut off our ‘low’ emotions - we lose the ability to feel the ‘high’ emotions.  Often, what ends up happening is people get stuck in perpetual pursuit of their next ‘high’ as they try to fill the void. Like Yin & Yang you cannot have all of one emotion and none of another. 
 
Over Legitimizing:  Likewise, we over-legitimize loss when we wallow martyr-like in our sadness. In the end people become consumed by grief and self-pity to the point of disfunction, unable to experience joy and more committed to their misery than to their happiness. Depression often occurs not from sadness but from our resistance to it.  
 
Choosing either path - denying the legitimacy of a loss or over-legitimizing it - produces suffering on some level. Whilst we can’t always choose our experiences in life, we can always choose our experience of life. Ask Viktor Frankl, who lost his entire family in the holocaust and went on to live a life of extra-ordinary meaning, purpose and joy in the presence of his sadness.
 

Until next week, live boldly, shine brightly, feel deeply!
Margie