You Don't Have To Suffer

Choosing to Transform
Painful Experiences:
Life as a Challenge or
a Predicament

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

Goethe, Faust

What is extraordinary about us is that we each have the capacity to rise like the phoenix out of our own ashes, to create ourselves anew, to begin again. We can transform ourselves and our lives, regardless of what we have endured before now. Maybe the true purpose of suffering is that out of our pain we will rise, expand, grow, and achieve.

We each have an amazing and powerful capability for insight and change. We can awaken, enlighten ourselves, shift our view or our behavior, and turn our lives around. That is transformation. When we grasp our power to transform, we have the proverbial “keys to the kingdom.” Even though these “keys” are available to everyone, most of us never get to use them. Instead, we keep ourselves victims entrenched in suffering because of beliefs that we may not even be aware of and because of fear or unwillingness to change. The road to transformation can be filled with many potential pitfalls.

Seeing the opportunity instead of the predicament in distressing events is one way to empower ourselves and to transform our suffering. It is interesting that the Chinese use the same character for crisis and for opportunity. We would be less apt to consider ourselves victims if we saw that the events that provoke our suffering also offer us the opportunity to expand our ideas, awareness, actions, and aliveness. In a crisis we discover our ability to confront and survive life’s challenges, and from a crisis we can mature, transforming ourselves and our lives. The ability to transform our experiences, reactions, or confrontations with life turns all of life into an opportunity.

Seeing the opportunity in suffering can be difficult, for it is natural to neither want pain nor see any redeeming value in it. When we are right in the midst of the suffering, in the midst of grief, anguish, or distress, which one of us can see any purpose in it? I have never sat in the middle of a painful moment and thought it was worth it. However, it would be very powerful if we each could say, this is the hand I have been dealt; now I’ll play it as well as I can.

Usually it is only when a particular trauma is over or when the pain ceases that we look back and know that we were altered, even transformed, by the hurt, disappointment, or tragedy. Then we can see how we approached, handled, or experienced something differently than ever before.

Transformation is a spontaneous shift in our perspective or behavior, a shift in how we see our experience or a sudden shift in how we act. Although we may not address it as such, all of us have experienced transformation in our everyday lives, those times when our actions or feelings or viewpoint altered suddenly. After we let go of an old anger or hurt, all at once a relationship feels new and different. We are transformed when we do not get angry at the same old thing, or when we do a task or handle a problem in a new way, or we take some action that we never thought we could take.