The Transformative Power of Suffering
nextavenue.org
nextavenue.org
There's no silver lining to suffering. Your mind doesn't work. It's hard to concentrate. Sex isn't very enjoyable. It's next to impossible to exercise well. You're constantly irritated and lash out at the people around you. You don't get used to it. You adapt, sure, but it sucks big time.
F##k suffering.
(I'm getting better btw, doctors still don't know wtf happened to me).
I closely follow the latest studies on disc regeneration, but unfortunately medical research is still in the dark ages in that field, and no significant breakthrough is likely to make it past clinical trials anytime in the next decade.
So... sorry for the rant, but if there's some deep wisdom to be gained from suffering, I still haven't figured out what it is.
You learn to live with pain, and adapt to it. You learn that some activities are off limits, and will probably always be so. The trick is not to start feeling diminished, not fall into depression by comparing yourself to a mythical healed self, and learn to appreciate the life we have, which even with a bad back is still incomparably better than what the rest of humanity experienced for most of its existence on Earth.
There are ways to get better though, if you don't despair: after 10 years of trying countless practices and remedies, a combination of McKenzie exercises and acupuncture is finally working, allowing me to lead a mostly normal life (eg lots and lots of exercise and just refrain from cycling, contact sports, or bumpy activities like offroading).
My suggestion is to try that with absolute dedication (eg 100 repetitions spread over each day, weekly acupuncture sessions), and if you have no improvements in a couple of months, try something else. Improvement is possible, it just takes a lot of effort and time.
I don't know which lift the author was performing (and would ask you not to repeat it if you do know), but of the popular lifts which could cause a problem if you fail:
1) Bench press. Have a spotter or don't use clips (the things that hold the weights on the bar). Some benches will have safety bars which can help as well. If you don't have clips you can tip to one side and dump the weight off the end of one bar, then the bar should roll of you (albeit painfully/noisily). People have died benching alone in a gym, don't get caught out.
2) Squat. Have spotters and/or squat in a cage/safety rack (with parallel bars either side of you). It can be dangerous if you fail, have no spotters and aren't in a safety rack. i.e. you can dump it, but this can be dangerous to you and those around you.
Stay safe everyone.
If you want to just train, go for the safe options and a bit more reps. If you want to really break your limits, never not have a spotter. They will allow you to be a bit less safe on the one hand (e.g. bars with max weights) and provide you with motivation on the other. I never pushed past my limits before I had a spotter.
But naturally by virtue of not increasing the weight on the bar one will reach a point where one ceases to get stronger (measured by the amount of force you can produce). There are limits to what more reps will do for you.
So don't deadlift your 1RM every time you go to the gym, just slowly increase how much you lift in a safe and structured manner.
So unless you are a professional (then you already know about this more than I do), lower the weight and stick rather with 15-20 reps. If you feel that given excercise is too easy during set, just another 5 reps and try to do perfect movements. YOu can get the same famous 'burn' in the muscles. This also builds stamina, which is much more beneficial in real life compared to pure power for few seconds.
Needless to say, since I switched, i didn't have a single injury, not even minor stretches. Even if I am totally exhausted, I can handle the loads I use to put them down/to the rack safely.
But rather than a religious approach, I think it's best to talk about this from a psychology of trauma approach. In In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness by Peter A. Levine, the author describes the mindset that exacerbates suffering and also the mindset that leads to faster healing.
> trauma is neither a disease nor a disorder, but rather an injury caused by fright, helplessness and loss that can be healed by engaging our innate capacity to self-regulate high states of arousal and intense emotions.
There's some kind of magic alchemy that suffering allows us to access that not just causes us to physically heal faster, but also allows us to better transform normal, everyday living. And the quoted text, "innate capacity to self-regulate high states of arousal and intense emotions," is precisely where that alchemy happens.
High levels of arousal and intense emotion doesn't just happen when we're suffering, it also happens as a natural consequence of interpersonal relationships. But when we're suffering, the high levels of arousal and emotion don't go away, which allows us to experience them enough to learn how to regulate them.
Then when the suffering is over, when things get heightened during daily life, the regulatory capacity that suffering built serves to make the feelings flow easier. That's the transformation described.
Especially that he tries to "glorify" pain as a "true teacher". Maybe it worked for him like this, but it doesn't have to be so, joy and happiness can do the same if properly handled.
With luck, from humility comes empathy and compassion. Unfortunately, you’re just as likely to get fear and despair.
That doesn’t make suffering belong to any privileged ethical class— it still sucks!— merely that in responding to the normal fact that “time and chance happens to everyone”, we can extract the opportunity to grow and get something out of it other than pain and despair.
I'm empathetic to his suffering and applaud that he's managed to find a way to see a bright side. But when anyone goes from there to claiming that being in constant pain somehow makes you better, I see that as going overboard.
It's that attitude - with a stronger religious slant and a good touch of stinginess - that led MfT to have her "hospitals" re-using dulled injection needles and not providing effective pain relievers. And blathering nonsense about the beauty of suffering. The idea that suffering is a good thing is pretty much the most perverted idea humans have come up with.
No one would want to intentionally push themselves into their worst fears.
The idea that suffering is good destroys the intent of the message. Suffering that has happened is something to turn into good because for many people, that's what they need to let go of the cyclical pattern in the mind that believes (I do my best to do things -> bad things happen) which can sort of get stuck for an individual that is looking for patterns that relate the self to other selves.
All messages are an attempt to communicate that. Suffering that continues to happen is the mind playing tricks - the attempt to reason about suffering that is still happening, suffering that could happen, and suffering that might still be happening that the individual reasoning is either aware of, or not aware of.
You can't ignore the fact that suffering exists even if you do not suffer. For some people, being aware of this fact is how they suffer (and now I have achieved semantic satiation but that is besides the point).
I don't think it's anyone's intent to pervert having a good nature with good intentions. The problem is always, no one can know everything. You can beat yourself over the head with how every thought, action, and belief has consequences, see all the patterns, tie yourself to them, fear them, and perpetually dwell in suffering, but it doesn't make it true for a rabbi trying to reason morally in real time and for those that rabbi is around, nor does it make it true for you if you see those patterns.
I've heard plenty of stories about mother teresa but it's not like I actually knew her. Belief systems that jump to the worst possible case (fear) are something that seem to haunt jewish people - it's reasonable to assume this comes from generational trauma, perpetual jewish diaspora. Important not to get it flipped on them.
Fetishizing suffering if there's no way to mitigate the pain is actually a better strategy than being aware that it just sucks. If you can't really do anything about it, I think I would also start to talk like this. It's similar to "We're poor. Therefore, living in poverty is a virtue" - it's a reaction to a situation we're forced to be in. Seeing positive aspects in them gives us a way to cope with it - it's simply a coping mechanism so the mind doesn't lose its will to live.
I'm not a fan of re-using injection needles, too. That's the problem I see with this coping mechanism: You have to be careful. You shouldn't use this thinking to lead your actions, it's only good for situations where you're not able to change anything or control it (like chronic pain).
We do not need a new theological motivation for suffering, deification of poverty or anything like that. I'm definitely not comfortable with "pain is the route of all blessings" talk.
That said, there is an interesting, secular argument in here. We've been saying "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger" for a while. Its not true. Some things make you weaker, but it's not all things. Psychological "post trauma" is almost defined as painful experiences leading to bad things. But, we can probably find the opposite too, if we look in to non pathological cases. Either direction count as transformation.
Blathering nonsense about beauty (or worse, holiness) of suffering is a bad road. Understanding the non pathological (bad) results from suffering... that might be worthwhile.
I agree though, lets not put clerics in charge of the language.
Nietzsche, IMO, was the sort that believed that suffering was sort of part of human experience. But not necessarily suffering as in pain, just any form of hardship you might encounter. A lack of suffering would be exemplified by the last men, a group of humans that eliminated all suffering, hardship or negativity in their lives, who take no risks and only seek comfort. (It's a fictional society made up by Zarathustra, a fictional character in Nietzsche's books, as the most disgusting example of the goals of western civilization)
I disagree with the premise that suffering confers upon anyone special knowledge.
The same lessons, the same worldview, the same whatever, can be reached by people without the suffering. People like to say that everyone is different, let's not pretend that there's only one road to enlightenment then.
The only thing specific situations can teach us is how to cope with specific situations. Having a broken leg can teach you how to handle crutches better, how to balance on one foot, how to a third thing because you are temporarily disabled. But it cannot teach you how to be a better person. Now, a person with a broken leg might require and receive help and notice that people are genuinely nice and helpful and that changes their perspective on the world. But there are plenty of people who feel that way with two perfectly fine legs.
We deify struggle and suffering to such a degree it's kind of sad. There's no nobility in being in a shitty situation.
Just like you build muscle strength through weight resistance, you build mental strength through overcoming (or just living with) adversity. You may not value that growth or may not feel it is worth the suffering, but that belief is not fact, just opinion.
Given the exact same suffering, two people who have had similar lives will react in different ways. One may break down completely, one may soldier through.
Suffering doesn't build character, it reveals it.
You're doing the very thing I was saying we do too much of: glorifying suffering.
You're also trying to dismiss me by saying what I'm saying is opinion while also trying to say that I'm wrong. If I'm wrong, then it's not technically an opinion I hold. It's just bad information.
But you posit that you build mental strength through adversity without actually demonstrating that it's true. Then you claim my position is that I don't value the growth or feel it is worth suffering. That is not what I said. That is a deliberate misrepresentation of what I was saying.
I was saying suffering does not teach anything special that cannot be learned elsewhere.
I also like how you choose to engage me, rather than the people who shared personal anecdotes of suffering without being granted any special wisdom or knowledge, effectively saying what I said: suffering is not a teacher, suffering is just suffering.