Buddha said, “Life is suffering”. We listened, accepted and mourned about it. But did we understand the meaning of it? The most interesting, intelligent, funny creature on our planet earth is none other than we ‘the human being’, the homosapiens. If you ask anyone what they want from life, believe me, 9 out of 10 will say, “I just want to be happy” or “I want happiness”. But what we do actually is keep seeking for the opposite. We invest our whole life in search of pain and problem, rather than understanding or seeking the pleasure, which is the only source of happiness. In my limited awareness, I feel most of us are so fascinated with pain and problems that if we can’t find any pain in our present, we start replaying the tape of our past and if that is also not enough to take us away from pleasure, we start visualizing the worry and problems of our future. Thus we succeed in saying what Buddha said that life is suffering and I am suffering so badly and I am living this miserable life and so on. But have we ever thought that what is the meaning of Buddha’s saying? Many of us have heard pain is inevitable but suffering is not, but the truth is the pain is the seed of pleasure. Let’s discover the journey from pain to pleasure.

Every pain or problem comes to our life to give us a chance to learn, expand and grow. It is like a seed that requires lots of attention, light, energy manure and water to grow. On the other hand most of us ignores the pain to avoid the hard work we need to put in the process of seeking solution of the cause of pain, which is essential for the seed to become a big green fruit bearing tree.The pain we endure in our daily life, is like mathematics problems given to children in the school, to teach them, to make them grow, so they can track and manage their finances and life in future. The process of understanding the problem is most important to seek solution.

Every obstacle in flow of our life is like an artificially created problem to expand our intelligent. So the moment we start giving the attention to understand the pain rather than avoiding the pain, life starts to change. Every pain or discomfort we are feeling at the moment is like an opportunity, we just need to sit back and give it some time and try to understand what it wants to teach us and what it wants to show us. We need to understand how this specific challenge or pain or misery is going to change our universe. One of the major causes for this unfertile cycle is its root in the societal perception of pain. In many cultures, its considered as a sign of bad karma or result of bad deeds, so in our subconscious mind we start fearing pain. And tries to protect our children from pain, so since childhood our brain has been wired to avoid pain and we spend so much energy in denial and self pity that we have no energy left to look for the solution.

As Benjamin Franklin said, “Those things that hurt, instruct”. Yet we try our best to delay the process of accepting the pain and this tendency to hibernation and of avoidance of mental suffering, leads us to various kinds of mental health issues, so we end up falling in trap of neurosis which eventually results in much bigger suffering. Similar concept is also explained very beautifully by M. Scott Peck in his book The road Less Travelled as, “Wise people learn not to dread but actually to welcome problems and to welcome pain of the problems.”

Here on this journey towards inner and external growth, I want all of you to sit and take some time out, list down all the pains you have and depending on the intensity of pain, allocate the time for it. Understand what it wants to tell you, what is needed to address it. And then how it is going to move toward eternal pleasure, we are also enclosing a small list (click here) to make a simple exercise for you. I will write back to you soon. Till then enjoy your journey from pain to pleasure. Don’t forget to join us for ‘Ananda Tandava’- Dance away fear.

Nandita Sharma, Co-Founder Zaivic Tech-Wellness Solutions Pvt. Ltd.