the difference between pain and suffering

With Heartwards I am developing courses and training programs in psychological fitness,

because it has come to my attention (in the last 15 years or so) that there are root causes for both happiness and suffering, and I believe those causes are psychological.

I can stop mincing about and worrying that people are going to think that what I’m doing here is quote/unquote woo-woo, because everyone brings their thing to the table, and this is the thing I bring.

We all would like to see a happier and healthier world, and my contribution to bring this about is the offering of psychological-fitness training.

I like the motto “a healthy world arises out of healthy minds”.

And I believe in the idea that a happy and healthy world arises when we learn to see the world (and ourselves) as happy and healthy.

The trick is we have to learn how to choose our conceptions, our cognitions, our thoughts and feelings about what happens in the world: how we perceive and interpret the world makes all the difference.

And the difference is between happiness and suffering.

I just saw on Instagram, an idea I aspire to embody: pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.

For example, it might be painful to feel we have failed at something that was important to us, but we transmute this and avoid suffering by choosing to see it as an opportunity to learn.

🤯 That’s called a growth mindset.

Now. It’s no great secret that the dichotomy of terms “happiness and suffering” comes from Buddhism, at least in my experience. And the idea that these result from “root causes” is also something I picked up from Buddhism (where the root causes of suffering are called the Three Poisons: desire, aversion and ignorance).

Turn this around and it means the root causes of happiness are things like gratitude, acceptance and wisdom – these are heart qualities we can use psychological-fitness training to cultivate internally, so that happiness is a more-spontaneous and more-frequent response to the world, no matter what state or events are happening around us.

We don’t need to suffer if we have the appropriate psychological skills at our disposal.

The Buddhist conception of suffering has rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way, I think.

Another translation of the term dukkha is ‘dissatisfaction’, and dukkha or suffering in this context refers to the dissatisfaction and the vague sense of unease we feel in life when we pursue happiness primarily in the domain of pleasure, motivated by desire and perpetuated by ignorance of the reality that sense gratification can only ever be fleeting, temporary, bound to keep us very much preoccupied with our trip on the hamster wheel of material success.

And it is a trip, in the sense that our preoccupation with the material world is based on delusion or hallucination.

Another way to discuss this without triggering aversion to the terminology of Buddhist psychology is through the dichotomy of hedonia (the pursuit of happiness through primarily external sense gratification) and eudaemonia (the experience of happiness from within).

Whichever way we want to peel the onion, in the end we come to the same conclusion:

• happiness comes from within;
• pursuing happiness in external sources of pleasure leads inexorably to suffering.

We all were told this at some point, that happiness comes from within. But how many of us were told how to find or experience this alleged internal wellspring of happiness?

That’s where psychological fitness comes in: we can train ourselves to embrace reality as it is, and this embrace results naturally in happiness,

which is not always pleasant.

Happiness is another word that’s heavily loaded, and we’d do well to use terms like contentment and equanimity instead, which I’d love to unpack another time.

The point for now is that Heartwards is a spiritual service

in the sense that ‘psychology’ was originally the study of the soul, not just of the mind or of the neuroses of human behaviour.

And all of the great so-called spiritual traditions are, at their heart, modalities of psychotherapy.

So that’s the update for today.

My desire for a sleep-in was frustrated by the cats this morning, and I felt sure my Sunday was ruined: anxiety started, rumination kicked in, and before I knew it I was kicking myself inside the head with all sorts of cognitive distortions.

Then I turned it around because I remembered that happiness is a choice we can make if we are in possession of the right psychological skills.

If that sounds like woo-woo, then carry on, nothing to see here.

If it sounds like something you’d like to learn more about and start applying in your life, get in touch.