All suffering - great and small

Jefferson Breland

(8/2021) This month I will introduce some ideas around the subject around suffering and our health. Next month, I will offer some ideas about how to be with suffering in more peaceful ways.

Over the past 11 years, I would have conversations with my mother about how to move through life more peacefully. I thought, "Hey, let’s have a mother - son discussion about suffering?"

I offered my mother a definition of suffering that included the daily small happenings that raise our blood pressure, bring a tear to our eye, tighten our stomach into knots, cause to yell at the television, want to take a nap, and the like.

My mother disagreed. She said, "I know what real suffering is. That’s not suffering." I agree that she knows what suffering is. At the age of two, she survived an automobile accident that killed her mother. She lived through the insecurities of being a wife of a WWII bomber pilot. Her only daughter died of cancer at age 14. She helped my father, her husband of more than 65 years, navigate the shifting of his memory that included more of the past, less of the recent, and almost none of the present. She experienced crippling, chronic knee pain. She broke both of her hips and fractured her pelvis all in one year in three separate falls when she was 93-years old. So, yes, she knows deep and profound suffering. She knows suffering inside and out.

In the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, a few lines after the only line most people seem to remember, "To be or not to be…" is another that refers to these daily knocks or sufferings to our energy/emotional body and mind, "To die, to sleep no more: and by a sleep, to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to…." Hamlet is basically saying that our birthright as human beings is pain and heartache, life contains suffering and the only way to end the suffering is death. Who knew Hamlet was a Buddhist? As far as death being the only way to end suffering, I say, "Maybe?" (My answer to this will come in part two next month.)

What I attempted to explain to my mother is the distinction between "necessary" suffering and "unnecessary" suffering. In short, "necessary" suffering is the big stuff as experienced by my mother. "Unnecessary" suffering is created by our expectations of how things should be. It is also when we attach meaning to stuff other people do or say to us forgetting that nothing is personal unless we choose it to be. (More on that last sentence next month.)

So with this distinction between necessary and unnecessary suffering, it is easier to see that it isn’t only the big stuff that hurts. The small stuff that triggers emotional responses in our daily life puts us off balance too.

These smaller "slings and arrows" might be a person driving differently than you want them to (going too fast, going too slow, changing lanes without signaling, etc.), politics (need I say more?), financial concerns, a word spoken in anger, a word spoken without thinking, unrequited love, the news, not finding a parking spot, spilling milk…the list is virtually endless. Some people call this type of suffering, "stress."

I don’t like the word stress as our society uses it. Before the mid-1930’s, stress was purely an engineering term used to describe the effect of compression, tension, or the load put on a building material. The word "stress" in the context of human activity is too general and doesn’t acknowledge the specific emotion that has been created which then doesn’t acknowledge that we can do something with the emotion or the cause of the emotion. We are not I-beams. (More on the "acknowledgement" aspect of this in next month’s article.)

The effect of these repeated "smaller" sufferings, necessary or unnecessary is cumulative and can be significant. We feel them in the moment and they become almost invisible in our memory; however, our bodies remember everything. "Aye, there’s the rub."

A biological reason for body memory/muscle memory is that when we experience an emotion, a feeling is created. We think our mind is where our emotions happen. The answer is yes and no. In the presence of an emotion our brains release proteins into our bodies called neuropeptides. These proteins create a bodily sensation that our brains associate with the cause of the emotion be it fear, anger, joy, sadness, worry, or grief.

So what does this have to do with anything? Everything.

Over time, in the presence of repeated experiences, our bodies and minds can go on auto-pilot and continue to produce the same neuropeptides whose presence in our bodies can effect our health. It can effect the expression of our genes and produce dis-ease. It can cause tight muscles and joints since we usually store "stress" in specific parts of our bodies. It effects the way we walk, stand, sit, sleep, eat, etc. The "stress" becomes a part of our lifestyle; an accepted part of the way we live our lives. It’s just the way life is. It the cost of doing business or living life, so to speak. That is often our story about it. (Stay tuned for more on this in next month’s article)

Beginning in the early 21st century, a new field of medicine emerged called epigenetics. It is the study of the effect of lifestyle on the expression of our genes and thus our health. Studies show that 90-95% of all disease are caused by lifestyle.

Wait a minute. You mean to tell me that only 5-10% of disease is genetic? So what does that mean to me?

I am glad you asked. It means that we have more potential influence in our health than we have been led to think. It means that when we pay attention to subtle symptoms we can make small, sustainable changes in our lives that will have a big impact on our health. It means that that we are not doomed by our genetic code as we have been led to believe. It means that we have the power to heal ourselves. It means hope.

Stay tuned to next month’s Complementary Corner for some ideas about how we can wake up to our body’s wisdom and do something with it. Thank you for your time.

 Jefferson Breland is a board-certified acupuncturist, he can be reached at 410-336-5876. Their office in Gettysburg is located at 249B York Street.