We suffer because we resist what is

• All of your pain and suffering comes from your resistance to what is. Dick Sutphen’s one sentence summary of the teachings of Buddha
• Suffering: the sense that things should be different than they are. Wayne Liquorman
• The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering. Ram Dass
• Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is… The only problem in your life is your mind’s resistance to life as it unfolds. Dan Millman
• The only time we suffer is when we believe a thought that argues with what is. When the mind is perfectly clear, what is is what we want. Byron Katie
• The pain that you create now is always some form of non=acceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind. Eckhart Tolle
• Misery needs your conspiracy; it needs your help. Without your resistance misery cannot survive. Adyashanti
• What you resist persists. What you look at disappears. Neale Donald Walsch
• Life is beautiful if you flow with its natural beauty. Resistance makes it ugly. Terri Guillemets
• The chief cause of suffering for human beings is an inability to have things be the way they are.
• Life is not suffering; it’s just that you will suffer it, rather than enjoy it, until you let go of your mind’s attachments and just go for the ride freely, no matter what happens. Dan Millman

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We suffer because we cling to permanence

• You do not suffer because things are impermanent. You suffer because things are impermanent, and you think they are permanent. Thich Nhat Hanh
• Buddha established the fact that life will always involve a certain amount of suffering. We will all get old, get sick and die. Our possessions will break and so will some of our relationships. According to Buddha, that’s just how it is. The fact that these things happen does not account for why we are unhappy, however. We are unhappy because we fight against it. We cling to our sense of how things should be, or how we want them to be. It is this attachment to expectations that presents the problem. Only by dealing with the fact that life is unpredictable—and will often bring pain and undesirable events—can we become “non- attached” and avoid the suffering that plagues most people. Brian Johnson
• Most of our troubles are due to our passionate desire for and attachment to things that we misapprehend as enduring entities. The Dalai Lama
• You only lose what you cling to. Buddha
• The wise are so totally detached, Pain is for those who are attached. K.Misra

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We suffer when we have fixed expectations that are not met

• If you don’t get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don’t want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. Dan Millman
• The gap between your expectations and reality is your suffering. John St. Augustine
• We can start to see that our pain lies between what we think should happen and what actually happens. Then, if we remove the secret demand for this or that to happen, the pain- gap vanishes. Vernon Howard
• Expectation is the root of all heartache. William Shakespeare
• As humans, we also suffer from not getting what we want and not keeping what we have. Kalu Rinpoche

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We suffer because we crave something too much and become addicted

• The root of all suffering is desire. Buddha
• The very search for pleasure is the cause of pain. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• It is not the lack of something that is behind your unhappiness; instead your craving is the root cause behind your unhappiness. Sampo Kaasila
• Intentions are a form of desire. Desire per se is not the root of suffering; craving is. The key is to have wholesome intentions without being attached to their results. Rick Hanson
• People think that if they had no cravings, they’d be like deadwood. But in fact, they’d lose their tension. Get rid of your fear of failure, your tensions about succeeding, you will be yourself. Relaxed. You wouldn’t be driving with your brakes on. That’s what would happen. Anthony de Mello
• Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.  Alan Wilson Watts

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We suffer because we believe and identify with our negative thoughts

• Suffering is believing in the thoughts that the mind throws up. Eckhart Tolle
• Suffering seems real because we don’t have a clear understanding of our true nature. Instead, we believe the passing thoughts, such as ‘I am no good, ‘I am not there yet,’ ‘I am stuck’ or whatever the thought may be. Eventually we understand that we are not those thoughts. Once our real self is pointed out, the suffering loses its grip. John Wheeler
• Pain is of the body. Suffering is of the mind. Both arise in awareness. On the surface, suffering is the mind’s resistance to or refusal of pain. On a deeper level, suffering is the result of believing yourself to be a separate self. Withdraw identification from the ego idea and all suffering drops away immediately. Will things still hurt? Of course. But they will not produce unnecessary suffering. Richard Young
• What you call “your” thoughts are just thoughts arising in consciousness. Taking ownership of them is what causes suffering. Michael Jeffrey
• Misery is almost always the result of thinking. Joseph Joubert
• Pain is inevitable as long as you are identified with your mind. Eckhart Tolle

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We suffer because we mentally label something as bad and then resist it

• Suffering begins when you mentally label a situation as bad. That causes an emotional contraction. When you let it be, without naming it, enormous power is available to you.  The contraction cuts you off from that power, the power of life itself.  Eckhart Tolle
• It isn’t the things that are happening to us that cause us to suffer, it’s what we say to ourselves about the things that are happening. Pema Chodron
• Suffering has nothing to do with events, but with one’s reaction to them. What’s happening is merely what’s happening. How you feel about it is another matter. Neale Donald Walsch
• It isn’t what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it’s what we say to ourselves about what happens. Pema Chodron
• Suffering doesn’t come from the fact; it comes from the meaning we assign to the fact. Tony Robbins

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We suffer because we identify with our emotional pain and create a story around it

• It is not the pain-body, but identification with it that causes the suffering that you inflict on yourself and others. It is not the pain- body but identification with the pain-body that forces you to relive the past again and again and keeps you in a state of unconsciousness. Eckhart Tolle
• As long as you make an identity for yourself out of the pain, you cannot become free of it. As long as part of your sense of self is invested in your emotional pain, you will unconsciously resist or sabotage every attempt that you make to heal the pain. Why? Quite simply because you want to keep yourself intact, and the pain has become an essential part of you. This is an unconscious process, and the only way to overcome it is to make it conscious. Eckhart Tolle
• Emotion in itself is not unhappiness. Only emotion plus an unhappy story is unhappiness. Eckhart Tolle
• As long as we define ourselves in terms of our pain and our problems, we will never be free from them. Eckhart Tolle
• The pain-body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it. Eckhart Tolle

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We suffer because we close our hearts

• The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers. Deepak Chopra
• The love that you withhold is the pain that you carry. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• In separateness lies the world’s great misery, in compassion lies the world’s true strength. Buddha

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We suffer because we refuse to let go of our suffering

• People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar. Thich Nhat Hanh
• Pain is not the same as suffering. Left to itself, the body discharges pain spontaneously, letting go of it the moment that the underlying cause is healed. Suffering is pain that we hold on to. It comes from the mind’s mysterious instinct to believe that pain is good, or that it cannot be escaped, or that the person deserves it. Deepak Chopra
• Many of us are not capable of releasing the past, of releasing the suffering of the past. We want to cling to our own suffering. Thich Nhat Hanh
• Human beings sometimes find a kind of pleasure in nursing painful emotions, in blaming themselves without reason or even against reason. Isaac Asimov

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We suffer because we’re out of touch with the truth

• It is always the false that makes you suffer, the false desires and fears, the false values and ideas, the false relationships between people. Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth makes happy, truth liberates. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Suffering points out that there is falsehood somewhere. Suffering occurs when you clash with reality. When your illusions clash with reality when your falsehoods clash with the truth, then you have suffering. Otherwise there is no suffering. Anthony de Mello

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We suffer because we blame

• When you blame, you open up a world of excuses, because as long as you’re looking outside, you miss the opportunity to look inside, and you continue to suffer. Donna Quesada

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We suffer because we try to control what we cannot

• When you say or do anything to please, get, keep, influence, or control anyone or anything, fear is the cause and pain is the result. Byron Katie

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The truth is that pain in life is inevitable while suffering is optional

• You move totally away from reality when you believe that there is a legitimate reason to suffer. Byron Katie
• Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. The Dalai Lama
• If you can go through life without experiencing pain you probably haven’t been born yet. Neil Simon
• The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life. Eckhart Tolle
• Life will bring you pain all by itself. Your responsibility is to create joy. Milton Erickson
• To avoid pain, they avoid pleasure. To avoid death, they avoid life. Osho
• Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth. Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Pain is inevitable as long as you are identified with your mind. Eckhart Tolle
• I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering. Colette
• Pain is the feeling. Suffering is the effect the pain inflicts. If one can endure pain, one can live without suffering. If one can withstand pain, one can withstand anything. If one can learn to control pain, one can learn to control oneself. James Frey
• I am the perpretor of my suffering – but only all of it. Byron Katie
• Pain is the sensations of discomfort that may be unavoidable; suffering is the ways we react to pain that just makes it worse. Jon Kabat-Zinn
• Pain is inevitable as long as you are identified with your mind, which is to say as long as you are unconscious, physically speaking. I am talking here primarily of emotional pain, which is also the main cause of physical pain and physical disease.  Resentment, hatred, self-pity, guilt, anger, depression, jealousy, and so on, even the slightest irritation, are all forms of pain.  Eckhart Tolle
• If you don’t get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don’t want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is a law, and no amount of pretending will alter that reality. Dan Millman
• It is almost impossible for anyone, even the most ineffective among us, to continue to choose misery after becoming aware that it is a choice. William
• Pain is inevitable but misery is optional. Tim Hansel
• Disease is somatic; the suffering from it, psychic. Martin H. Fischer

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Suffering is only necessary until you realise it is unnecessary

• Is suffering really necessary? Yes and no. If you had not suffered as you have, there would be no depth to you as a human being, no humility, no compassion. You would not be reading this now. Suffering cracks open the shell of ego, and then comes a point when it has served its purpose. Eckhart Tolle
• Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary. Eckhart Tolle

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A perspective on suffering

• By suffering, the Buddha was referring to our dissatisfaction with the circumstances of our lives. All of us have experienced this dissatisfaction: it’s found in our longing for our life to be different than it is, even when we have no control over the particular circumstance in question. Toni Bernhard, J.D.

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