End All Suffering Now! Understanding The 6 Aspects Of Suffering And How To Stop It!

Understanding The 6 Aspects Of Suffering

And How To End It

Many people turn to self help because of the fact that their lives are not what they want it to be…and they are oftentimes experiencing some form of suffering.  In fact this is the reason why Buddhism is one of the most popular and prosperous religions today (not that this is going to be a religious article).  The truth is that suffering is a huge part of life, and is something that everyone has to deal with at some time or another.  And (not) ironically it is something that motivates people to want to try to better themselves (so that they can put an end to their suffering).

And so in doing this, it is important to not just try to replace your suffering and negative/adverse elements in your life with positive ones, but to really understand the nature of your suffering and work with it for a resolution.  Then you can really begin to make your life what you want it to be, as well as your state of being, so that you can always feel the way that you want to feel.

But first, we must face our suffering, and what makes it what it is.

So to help you to understand the nature of suffering in general, I have delineated it into multiple categories so that any form of suffering can be easily broken down into its constituent parts, causes/effects and the like, so that it can be apprehended and resolved.  This is a model that may be applied to any situation.

THE NATURE OF PAIN AND SUFFERING

The 2 Types of Pain:

-Physical

-Emotional

Now your pain can actually be both of course.  Or it can start with one, which will cause the other.  Physical pain can cause emotional pain and vice versa.  This mind/body connection is one of the things that is well understood by holistic practitioners such as myself.  So it is important to figure out whether your pain is rooted in one or the other, and if one is perhaps causing or perpetuating the other.

The 2 types of Suffering:

-Transient

-Self Perpetuating

It is important to know when you are experiencing a form of suffering that is totally situational and will soon pass…or if you are actually perpetuating your own suffering.  For you see all suffering has the potential to be transient…however many times people perpetuate their own suffering, allowing it to become an ongoing thing through their own focus on it with unhealthy mental processes, or unhealthy lifestyle choices (rather than making course corrections), etc.  So when you find yourself suffering, it is important to know whether it is something that is transient, or is ongoing due to some form of self perpetuation.  Now there may be times when you feel as though other things are perpetuating your suffering, but what is most important here is to understand that you always play the primary role in your own suffering and can make healthy choices necessary to cause it to pass, no matter what things outside of yourself may also be effecting you (which you can usually choose to remove from your life).

The 2 Categories of Pain/Suffering:

-Useful and Lesson Producing

-That Without Purpose

Here is an interesting way of delineating your pain/suffering.  Does it have a lesson to learn?  Or is it absolutely meaningless?  It is important to learn from your suffering whenever possible, which will help you to not only resolve it but to ensure it never occurs again in that same way, and that you can better yourself and your life from it.  However there are some forms of pain and suffering that simply can not teach or benefit us in any way.  So you absolutely must figure out if your suffering has something that you can learn and take away from it for your own betterment, or if it is completely useless.  Once you have done that, you can either learn your lesson and apply it to your life for your own personal development…or not!  haha, and then of course just move on to overcoming your pain and suffering.

The 2 Ways of Overcoming Pain/Suffering:

-Ignore it and move on

-Work with the issue

This is a very important point here because most people will only do the former option and not the latter.  When ignoring your issue and simply trying to move past it is usually not the best way to do it, because ignoring a problem does not make it go away…but rather allows it to grow while you are not paying attention to it.  There are cases in which it is appropriate to simply ignore a cause of suffering and move past it however.  Such as when the issue is transient, or when it is due to your own mental complex and should not be given focus, or is something else that will really only be perpetuated by focus and will go away if you do not focus on it…but when there is a problem that is causing you to suffer, you must then give your attention to the problem and work on it to fix the situation in order to resolve your suffering.  No matter how much you may not want to think about or address and deal with the issue, you simply must!  And as a matter of fact, the more you do not want to think about/deal with it, the more of an indicator of how much you actually really do need to that is!  So just do it!  And then you will be able to move on without this problem coming up again later at a larger capacity and causing you more suffering!

The 2 Causes of Pain/Suffering:

-Circumstantial Limitations

-Behaviors and Actions

Now these are not always separate.  Sometimes you can have actions that have limited you.  But oftentimes your limitations are not coming from yourself, but outside sources.  Or other times your actions may not be generally limiting, but will have produced some sort of unfortunate circumstance that caused you pain.  So it is important to look at your situation and see whether or not your own actions has caused your pain or suffering…or if you are a victim of limiting circumstance.  Many people suffer simply because they feel limited in their life.  While many suffer because of their own behaviors which hurt rather than help them.  And again, sometimes it is your own behaviors and actions that produce a limiting lifestyle, so they may actually be occurring in cooperation with one another, perhaps even in a self perpetuating manner as with the physical and emotional pain from the first category.  It is important to understand these factors if you are going to solve the cause of your suffering, which is done by either changing your own behaviors and making course corrections to your actions…Or re-working your situation to free yourself of outer circumstantial limitations…or both!

The 2 Solutions to Suffering

-Treating The Symptoms and Feelings of Pain

-Curing Root Causes and Solving Problems

Not unlike the 2 ways of overcoming suffering, many people will only treat their symptoms and superficial feelings when they find themselves in pain, rather that the root cause of it.  However as a holistic practitioner I must stress the importance of addressing your root causes.  For if you are not treating the problems that cause your suffering how can it go away?  Now of course, while this is usually what is needed, there are actually exceptions.  Obviously if you are in pain you want to treat the symptoms in many cases, sure.  And so oftentimes you will actually want to do both.  Take the common headache for example.  Sometimes this will be caused by something that is transient, which you do not need to solve the cause of, because the cause has already passed, but the headache still remains.  In this case you will only treat the symptom, of course.  However many headaches are caused by stress, lack of sleep, poor diet, etc.  As with many forms of pain.  What you would want to do here is to make sure you have investigated what the root cause of this pain might be so that you can try to solve that (ideally before you start to treat any symptoms) to see if the symptoms will actually go away on their own when the root cause is dealt with.  Now in many cases, they will not.  For instance if you have a headache due to lack of sleep, you could take a nap that will make it go away…and then you will not need to take any aspirin…however what if you do not have time for a nap?  Well then of course you’d simply want to take the aspirin first, and plan on getting more sleep later that night.  As with a stress headache, or a headache induced by eating food with toxic chemicals in it…obviously stress or toxins in your system do not have an immediate remedy, it will take time to recalibrate those things in your body.  So take the aspirin first, but make sure that you are treating those root causes later.  However, as I said, there are many instances in which you will actually be able to address a root cause without needing to treat any superficial symptoms of pain.  Like for instance if you had a hunger headache because of missing a meal…are you going to take aspirin….or simply eat something?  Obviously you’d want to eat something!

And so as you can see, with this model of the nature of suffering, you can very easily delineate everything you need to know about it to understand how it works and how to resolve it, and I know that if you apply this model to any situations you have in which you are suffering or in pain, that you will be able to put a stop to it every time, and always feel the way that you want to feel and live the life that you want to live.  And that is really what we are here to do isn’t it?  Which is what all of these self help and personal development practices are for!

So give this a try next time you find yourself feeling any way you do not want to.  And if you are ready to take your personal development to the next level, click here now to sign up for my “Power of You” Course, which teaches you everything you need to know in order to get away from your suffering and succeed in your life in all of the ways you want to, from health to psychology to spirituality, it will get you the life of your dreams!

And good luck on your journey to success!