Suffering may not be the enemy it appears to be. Life seems arranged not to keep you comfortable but, in its own strange way, to wake you up, and pain often does what ease never could. Met with awareness rather than resistance, even deep suffering can become a doorway rather than a wall.
There is a moment in some dreams when you step off a stair that is not there, and the whole body lurches. First it startles you badly. Then, if the jolt is strong enough, you wake, and find yourself lying safe in your own bed with the dream already thinning. Suffering can work like that. It startles, it drops the floor out from under the life you thought you were living, and if you give real attention to what is actually happening, something in you wakes and discovers that beneath the pain, nothing is fundamentally wrong.
This runs against nearly everything we are taught. We learn early that suffering is simply bad, a thing to be expelled at once, and that if even a grain of it appears in a life you are supposed to fix that life immediately. To live with any suffering, rather than instantly banishing it, is treated as a kind of failure. Even the compassion we feel for people who suffer is often, if we are honest, tangled up with our own wish to be rid of discomfort, our own quiet fear. The flight from pain is deep in us, and the modern world has done little but sharpen the running.
So it needs saying plainly that to call suffering a doorway is not to glorify it, and certainly not to seek it out. The point is not to become someone who courts pain or wears it as a badge. The joy, when there is any, never comes from the thing that hurts. It comes from being aware in the midst of it. It comes from being awareness itself, the quiet witnessing that is present through every thought about who you are and every wave of feeling that passes through. That awareness is not damaged by the pain it observes.
There are sufferings so deep they seem to burn a hole straight through a person, until there is nothing left in them to burn. A great loss can do this, a grief that undoes the very self that is grieving. And here is the counterintuitive turn. When the person you took yourself to be is finally consumed, that ending can be a release rather than a catastrophe. The one who then looks out through the eyes of suffering, if it is looked through with compassion instead of resistance, has a way of turning the raging fire down into glowing embers, and what remains is a plain, unarguable view of life as it is.
You do not have to go looking for any of this. Suffering arrives on its own, in illness, in goodbyes, in the small daily frictions that wear at everyone. The invitation is only to stop bracing long enough to look directly at what is here, and to notice the one who is aware of it. The pain may remain for a while. But the frightened story wrapped around it can loosen, and in that loosening you may find, quietly and without drama, that you are already more awake than you were.
Questions that arise
What is the purpose of suffering?
Suffering has a way of interrupting the life you were sleepwalking through and returning your attention to what is real. It is less a punishment than a wake-up, an interruption that can open the door to awareness if it is met rather than only fled.
Does this mean I should just accept my pain and do nothing?
Accepting pain is not passivity, and it does not mean refusing help or care. It means stopping the inner war against what is already here, so that you can see clearly and respond from awareness rather than blind reaction. Clear seeing usually leads to wiser action, not less.
Why do painful times seem to change people so deeply?
Because pain strips away much of what a comfortable life lets us keep, including illusions about ourselves. When those fall, something more essential is often revealed. Many people find that their deepest changes grew out of their hardest seasons.
How can there be any joy in suffering?
The joy is never in the pain itself. It is in the awareness that can be present even while the pain is there, an awareness that remains whole and untouched. That is a very different thing from enjoying the suffering, which would only deepen it.
These contemplations are drawn from The Sound of the Bells by Jussi Niittyviita, the story of a dying man who learns to hear the stillness beneath his life. More of his books, audiobooks, and courses are at www.jussiniittyviita.com.