If you’re the type who panics at the thought of physical injury and being unable to engage in your day to day exercise or activities – this article is for you.
Say you take a spill on the trail and hurt your elbow. For a moment, all your body-mind system can concentrate on is the physical pain and how much it hurts.
It takes a bit, but eventually the pain begins to dissipate. Yes, you might be left with an ache or a numbness for a few days. But the intensity of the pain of hitting your elbow does, over time, go away.
But perhaps you have to curtail your activities or exercise. And this can cause some of us a lot of anxiety.
In meditative traditions, we have a name for this kind of anxiety that exists on top of the actual physical pain: suffering. Suffering is the story we attach to the pain in our lives. In this example, the fall might keep us in a ruminative loop. We can’t stop thinking about how clumsy we are, how our partner should have told us the trail was rocky, how bad things are always happening to us, how now we won’t be able to run the race we’ve been planning on. These thoughts perpetuate the suffering, and we continue to feel anxious, overwrought, and sad.
Unlike physical injury, with suffering we do have a choice. We can choose to interrupt the thought train of negativity and fill the space with different thoughts entirely. We can actively choose to NOT dwell in suffering.
Here, in this moment of choice, is a glimpse into your own personal freedom.
