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To free ourselves of suffering, we need to face our pain and open ourselves up to it 

• Pain itself destroys pain. Suffering itself frees man from suffering. Jiddu Krishnamurti
• The truth is that you need to say yes to suffering before you can transcend it. Eckhart Tolle
• We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey. Kenji Miyazawa
• I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it. Oriah Mountain Dreamer
• We are healed of a suffering only by expressing it to the full. Marcel Proust
• One’s suffering disappears when one lets oneself go, when one yields – even to sadness. Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• If you want to end your suffering, enter your pain. Robert Augustus Masters
• A lot of people say they want to get out of pain, and I’m sure that’s true, but they aren’t willing to make healing a high priority. They aren’t willing to look inside to see the source of their pain in order to deal with it. Lindsay Wagner
• The pain in those chakras is meant to be felt; experienced. You are going to feel it (the sadness, and despair) move. It’s part of the “push-through”. The energy in the solar plexus, especially, needs to move… Lena Lees

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Realise that the fear of suffering is often worse than suffering itself 

• Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. Paulo Coelho
• The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt. Thomas Merton
• A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears. Michel de Montaigne

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Always be on the watch for the emergence of any emotional pain 

• Watch out for any sign of unhappiness in yourself, in whatever form—it may be the awakening of the pain- body. This can take the form of irritation, impatience, a somber mood, a desire to hurt, anger, rage, depression, a need to have some drama in your relationship, and so on. Catch it the moment it awakens from its dormant state. Eckhart Tolle

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As soon as you detect it, stop it from taking hold by becoming intensely focused on your inner body 

• Learn what the most common triggers are that activate the pain body, whether it be situations or certain things other people do or say. When those triggers occur, you will immediately see them for what they are and enter a heightened state of alertness. Within a second or two, you will also notice the emotional reaction that is the arising pain-body, but in that state of alert Presence, you won’t identify with it, which means the pain-body cannot take you over and become the voice in your head. Eckhart Tolle

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Observe your pain mindfully and without judgement and it will be transmuted 

• Just as you cannot fight the darkness, you cannot fight the pain-body. Trying to do so would create inner conflict and thus further pain. Watching is enough. Watching it implies accepting it as part of what is at that moment. Eckhart Tolle
• The pain-body doesn’t want you to observe it directly and see it for what it is. The moment you observe it, feel its energy field within you, and take your attention into it, the identification is broken. A higher dimension of consciousness has come in. I call it presence. You are now the witness or the watcher of the pain-body. This means that it cannot use you anymore by pretending to be you, and it can no longer replenish itself though you. You have found your own innermost strength. You have accessed the power of Now.  Eckhart Tolle

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End suffering by suffering consciously 

• Become friendly with your pain body. Do not resist it or hold it down. Don’t identify with it. Observe it, while remaining intensely aware of your inner body. Bring your pain body into the light of presence. Free its energy. Allow the pain to become fuel for consciousness. Eckhart Tolle
• Suffering drives you deeper. The paradox is that suffering is caused by identification with form and erodes identification with form. A lot of it is caused by the ego, although eventually suffering destroys the ego—but not until you suffer consciously. Eckhart Tolle
• When you accept suffering, however, there is an acceleration of that process which is brought about by the fact that you suffer consciously. You can accept suffering for yourself, or you can accept it for someone else, such as your child or parent. In the midst of conscious suffering, there is already the transmutation. The fire of suffering becomes the light of consciousness. Eckhart Tolle
• We transcend suffering, not because our problems are solved, but because we experience a level of consciousness in which nothing is missing, a way of being that doesn’t depend on the conditions of our mind, body, and life situation. Peter Fenner

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End suffering by accepting each moment of your life as if you had chosen it 

• True freedom and the end of suffering is living in such a way as if you had completely chosen whatever you feel or experience at this moment. This inner alignment with Now is the end of suffering. Eckhart Tolle
• Now, instead of wanting this moment to be different from the way it is, which adds more pain to the pain that is already there, is it possible for you to completely accept that this is what you feel right now? Eckhart Tolle
• Let there be space around your unhappiness. That space comes when there is inner acceptance of whatever you are experiencing in the present moment. Eckhart Tolle
• Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore, trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility; for his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen, and the cup he brings, though it burn your lips has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears. Kahlil Gibran

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End suffering by being intensely present in the present moment 

• The more you are able to honor and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of suffering – and free of the egoic mind. Eckhart Tolle
• The whole essence of Zen consists in walking along the razor’s edge of Now – to be so utterly, so completely present that no problem, no suffering, nothing that is not who you are in your essence, can survive in you. In the Now, in the absence of time, all your problems dissolve. Suffering needs time; it cannot survive in the Now. Ekhart Tolle 

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End suffering by changing the way you perceive external events 

• The way to reduce the pain which you associate with earthly experiences and events—both yours and those of others—is to change the way you behold them. Neale Donald Walsch

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End suffering by disidentifying with your thoughts 

• I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didn’t believe them, I didn’t suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that. I found that suffering is optional. I found a joy within me that has never disappeared, not for a single moment. Byron Katie
• Thoughts are friends, not enemies. They’re just what is. They appear. They’re innocent. We’re not doing them. They’re not personal. They’re like the breeze or the raindrops falling. Thoughts arise like that, and we can make friends with them. Would you argue with a raindrop? Raindrops aren’t personal, and neither are thoughts. It’s the meaning you attach to those thoughts that you think is personal. Byron Katie

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End suffering through love and compassion and forgiveness 

• The more we think of others, the happier we are. The more we think of ourselves, the more suffering we feel. The Dalai Lama
• One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love. Sophocles
• We believe we are hurt when we don’t receive love. But that is not what hurts us. Our pain comes when we do not give love. We were born to love. Alan Cohen
• As Karl Menninger told his patients, and anyone else who was suffering and willing to listen, “Love cures, the ones who receive love and the ones who give it, too.” Wayne Dyer
• The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive. John Green
• What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love. Fyodor Dostoevsky

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End suffering by taking action to get out of painful situations 

• While the results of your choices may be difficult or painful, if the alternative was remaining in a situation that was making you miserable, consider this pain to be a blessing. It’s the ‘rip-it-off- quick’ pain of removing a sticking plaster, as opposed to the long, drawn out pain of peeling it off slowly. Perhaps the worst suffering comes from not removing the plaster at all and allowing the skin beneath to become infected. If something is wrong for you, and you will know it in your heart, I urge you to rip it off.  Amanda Harvey
• Sometimes a little discomfort in the beginning can save a whole lot of pain down the road. Wendelin Van Draanen

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End suffering through having a purpose 

• This is the core of the human spirit . . . If we can find something to live for—if we can find some meaning to put at the center of our lives— even the worst kind of suffering becomes bearable. Viktor Frankl

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End suffering by not resisting pain 

• The word “yes” sums up spirituality and sanity. An unconditional yes to what is frees us from the self- imposed suffering that results when we fear facing the givens of life. When pain enters our life, we activate our potential for facing it without complaint, and we gain compassion for others who also suffer. A yes to this fourth given frees us from the suffering that comes from useless protest.  David Richo

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End suffering by letting go of your grip on it …

• Suffering is not holding you. You are holding suffering. When you become good at the art of letting sufferings go, then you’ll come to realize how unnecessary it was for you to drag those burdens around with you. You’ll see that no one else other than you was responsible. The truth is that existence wants your life to become a festival. Osho
• Pain will leave you, when you let go. Jeremy Aldana
• People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them. George Bernard Shaw

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… letting go of anxious thoughts, resentments, grievances, regrets and self-criticism 

• Not only anxious thoughts, but also resentment, grievances, pointless complaining, guilt and regret, criticism of self and others, perpetual discontent…… are ways in which we unconsciously create suffering for ourselves. They arise in imagination (the mind). We need to recognize that these are all unnecessary baggage that brings a heaviness into our lives and strengthens a false sense of self. When you recognize their pointlessness, you can let go of them and then move through life without unnecessary baggage, enjoying the present moment, including its challenges. And so the present moment becomes your friend, and you begin to experience life as supportive, rather than hostile. This is the miracle of transformation. Eckhart Tolle

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To let go of negativity, learn to become detached from it the minute you become aware of it 

• If in the midst of negativity, you are able to realize “At this moment I am creating suffering for myself.” It will be enough to raise you above the limitations of conditioned egoic states and reactions. It will open up infinite possibilities which come to you when there is awareness—other vastly more intelligent ways of dealing with any situation. You will be free to let go of your unhappiness the moment you recognize it as unintelligent. Negativity is not intelligent. It is always of the ego. The ego may be clever, but it is not intelligent. Eckhart Tolle