Suffering Is Optional By Jafree Ozwald

Suffering Is Optional
By Jafree Ozwald

Often people live their entire lives and never bump into the possibility that their experience of suffering is optional.  What if the worry, fear, guilt or emotional pain you’re experiencing right now (if you’re aware of it) is truly a moment to moment choice that is constantly being made.  If suffering is optional, that means happiness is also a choice.  There are many things that people assume are true in life, and one of the most prevalent beliefs human beings have is that they don’t have the power to simply choose another experience.  This article will show you how to climb out of any traumatic trench you’re in, and empower your mind and liberate yourself of unnecessary suffering.

Let’s first start with understanding why does suffering exist in the first place?  Why would your soul choose to take on a body and go through this crazy set of challenges here on Earth?  If you didn’t have any heavy challenges to experience at all, you simply wouldn’t know what bliss, joy or ecstasy was like.  Suffering gives you the opportunity to make a comparison with one side of the pendulum before it swings back again.  If you’re in agony of some loss in your life, that feeling will one day give you the opposite experience of great joy when it is relieved of its duty.

“Experience life in all possible ways — good-bad, bitter-sweet, dark-light, summer-winter. Experience all the dualities. Don’t be afraid of experience, because the more experience you have, the more mature you become.” ~Osho

There are many types of suffering that humans incur upon themselves.  Almost everyone of them is self imposed.  On a soul level, there are no victims here.  We are each playing a karmic balancing game along with the law of attraction. Meaning, if you’ve attracted some trauma to you and you don’t know why, it may be that you requested it from past life actions to find forgiveness, or so that your soul can equalize out that past pain with some future state of bliss. No action that we make has zero consequences until we are truly living as a spiritually awakened being.

So what can you do to relieve yourself of suffering today?  Perhaps you are in perpetual pain in the physical body from a trauma, or living day to day with mental anguish such as over intellectualizing and theorizing until you’re blue in the face, or struggling with emotional suffering such as worry, fear, despair, depression etc. While some suffering is easier to transcend than others, they all have one thing in common.   They are based in an assumption that there is a separate source called “me” who is simply over-identifying with the suffering. This “me” is attached to the body, and deeply hooked into the idea that this idea of “me” is real.  When the identification ceases with this separate “me”, the level of suffering will slowly dissipate, even if its on a physical level.

There is nothing more powerful than knowing how to transcend your current personal experience of suffering.  This state of transcendence can be found by focusing on that which is beyond thoughts and feelings.  To discover the real soul, the spiritual essence, that which the mind has nothing to do with, will free you from any contracted experience you’re holding.  This very peaceful, expansive state of being is found by dropping all attachment to the mind.  To step back from your thoughts and see them for what they truly are, simply thoughts, you’ve taken the first big leap into claiming your freedom and enlightenment in this lifetime.