This is an old blog I wrote in 2009, and just realized I never published:
To Alleviate Suffering
For all of us in this life, there will be moments of intense
suffering. We know this is inevitable.
We know we will all experience loss, heartbreak and decay, we will all
have to know change and we will all be asked to transform ourselves, again and
again. The question then is not whether or not people will suffer, it is how
they will experience their suffering, how they will walk through it and what
transformations will follow.
I’ve recently been asking friends, “What does your suffering
teach you about joy, compassion, love?" Their responses have moved me, and have also shown me an aspect of who
they are at this moment, what lessons they are learning for this phase of their
lives. (I admit I've found myself
learning many lessons over and over again, approaching the lesson from a
different angle or perspective each time until I finally get it.) For some in answering this question, there is a beautiful
lightness and joy in their words, reliving the memory of a personal revelation: “Personally, a lot! In my worst experiences of suffering, I found reserves of
love and especially compassion that I never would have imagined otherwise. The
trick is putting those lessons to work." For others suffering is still associated deeply with anger, rage, loss, pain, a sense of injustice and strife. "How could you link 'joy, compassion, love' with suffering?" they want to know.
I've been asking this question about suffering because I am interested in people's
perspectives on the role suffering plays in our lives, people from all cultures
and countries and experiences. How people respond to this question may bely where each person is in her or
his own cycle of suffering/loss/grief/recovery and healing, and how each person takes the lessons life has given us. Raising the question of suffering can draw out a person's current relationship with suffering itself. One friend has a lot of anger, and interprets "right and wrong," "good and
bad" rather rigidly, viewing the world in absolutes. Life has offered him struggles existing very much now in the muddled grey areas, he finds himself in a fog, confused and still angry. Perhaps he needs to sit in the fog for while, perhaps the lesson he is trying to work through is offering an opportunity to accept and be comfortable with the blurred complexities, with the unclear and unknown. Another friend, brilliant, intensely pensive and
introspective, has been coming to terms in recent years with addiction and how he
has coped with his own losses and blocked new joy and happiness from entering
his life. His current relationship to suffering has been about letting old suffering die, letting it go so that new life and new
I'm thinking a
lot about the idea of suffering and my work, and the approach of people in the NGO/humanitarian field at large, as well as the individual experiences of suffering or
encountering suffering [...or attempting to address/struggle against/fight
suffering with the flat, structured "hardware" of material life]. Our
most transformative moments may come when we stop struggling against suffering
and embrace it, experience the pain fully and release it. Our most
transformative moments in community may be when we walk through suffering
together and come out the other side.
I've been writing this book, my working title "The Reluctant Aid Worker: Striving
for Sustainability in Reactionary Times." For a while I've been focusing
on what sustainability is, how listening is essential for sustainability and
transformation, and how this could (but does not currently) translate into the current
systems we have for working towards sustainable development and disaster risk
management and sustainable recoveries. If I am not careful, I can catch myself deeply mired in the layers of structure and mis-functions , the rhetoric and games of my field. To invite clarity, I'm stepping back and looking inward, returning to some key human
experiences: struggle, suffering, joy, compassion, learning, love. I want to deconstruct my work in the NGO realm: I want to
break it all down to build it back up again in a way that makes sense as much
to my heart, my spirit, as it does to my mind.
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In childbirth,
hospital interventions often result in complications and increase child and
mother mortality. Can we trust the ability of the human body to do what it has
been meant to do for the ages? Can we trust that the processes of nature may
know more than we?
How are NGO and
IGO interventions like these westernized hospital interventions? Should we approach our work as institutions
more like a doula, or midwife approaches her work? The first premise of a doula
is that the mother and the mother’s body knows best, and knows more than the
doula. She serves as a guide, shares her knowledge and experiences of the
birthing process, connects the mother to resources and ensures her safety and
well-being. She walks through the birthing process with the mother, but does
not do it for her, and does not tell her that she knows better than the
mother’s body does. She is a partner, a guide, a transporter of the knowledge
of generations, a resource and support.
Much like the
western medical interventions and institutions (which treat pregnancy as a
disease), our non-governmental, development
and disaster funding institutions were modeled and solidified during an
era which rejected the knowledge of the ages, which sought to overtake and
control the natural systems rather than to work through them, and were
established for profit-based and structure/materially-based motives and values.
I’ve worked for a many NGOs (non-governmental organizations)
around the world whose “motto” or “mission” includes the phrase, “our goal is
to alleviate suffering.” These missions/mottos sound credible, altruistic, just and righteous…but
what does this mean in "real terms?" And should that be
our end goal? Can that be our end
goal? Suffering is inevitable for all of
us, to greater and lesser extents, and within suffering rests perhaps the
greatest gift for humanity.
A woman giving birth naturally with a midwife reaches a
height of pain that transforms into ecstasy, an interlocking of pleasure and
pain simultaneously, followed by, with the birth, enormous joy, and a
realization of one’s own potential, strength and capacity.
To walk into pain and experience it fully, rather than
fighting it, what gift exists there? What strength, power, and self-agency can be discovered when we together walk through suffering and pain, and come out on the other side with dignity and respect?
Why is it that when I am amidst great suffering, I often am
filled with the greatest sense of hope?
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