Pain and Suffering

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

– Buddhist philosophy

I sought recovery while suffering from the guilt of my actions. The people who loved me and depended on me had been hurt by the choices I had made. I felt broken and that repair wasn’t possible. The shame was a heavy load to bear and I carried it alone and hopeless, convinced that I deserved every ounce of its weight.

I was introduced to a 12 step program of recovery by a sponsor who had traveled a path I didn’t know existed but somehow knew I needed. He didn’t lecture me or judge me. He simply showed me the way he had found the path I needed.

Through the spiritual work outlined in the book Alcoholics Anonymous and my growing desire to enlarge my spiritual life, I began to see myself differently. I learned that I could hold an honest understanding of who I had been alongside a hopeful vision of who I wanted to become. Those two things — the truth of my past and the possibility of my future — didn’t have to be at war with each other. They could coexist. They could work together. Psychologists call this “integration”. I call it serenity amidst the chaos; living in the eye of the storm.

Painful and difficult challenges didn’t disappear. They never do. But I learned to face them rather than run from them. To accept what I could not change, repair what I could, and find the lesson buried inside the experience.

It was then that I finally understood what the Buddhist philosophers meant. The pain of my past was inevitable — I could not undo it. But the suffering? That had always been a choice. And for the first time in my life, I chose differently.