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Stop Making Every Pain Prove Life Is Against You #selfawareness #shorts

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SoulWords—Rabbi Shais Taub avatar
SoulWords—Rabbi Shais Taub

Transcript

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Somebody once said, "Pain is unavoidable, suffering is optional." Or a version that I like even better, "Pain is unavoidable, suffering is self-inflicted." Pain is uncontrollable. It's an automatic response to stimulus. Suffering is the judgment I make in my mind how I interpret the meaning of that stimulus. Let me illustrate it, make it practical. I get up in the middle of the night, I'm walking down the hallway, and my kids had been playing LEGO earlier that day. And I step full force onto a LEGO, AND I SAY, "OW!" [screaming] THAT'S PAIN. STIMULUS-RESPONSE, no free choice, no time to even think. It's an automatic physiological response. A second later, I bury my head in my hands, and I say, "Why does stuff like this always happen to me?" That's the suffering. The suffering is the story, almost always a victimhood script that I tell myself about my pain. So, here's the deal. Emotional sobriety does not mean that we have a life in which we feel no pain. We may feel pain, but we don't tell ourselves a story of suffering.