Episode 48 - Suffering (Part 3)

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hey everybody welcome to the liturgist podcast i'm michael gunger before we get started today i just wanted to remind you about our charity water campaign so many of you that have already joined we're so grateful and excited to join together to do something meaningful in the world if you want to be a part of it with us and pledge your birthday go to the liturgists.com slash and with just a little bit of effort we can make a lot of difference in the world also this is going to be the last episode of the year it's been such a great year we're so grateful to you for listening all of you patrons who support this show we are so grateful if you want to join in the patrons and being a liturgist some of the people that make this work happen just go to the liturgists.com and there'll be a donate button that you can press and join us and we'll be so grateful and it will also allow you to continue to stay in touch with us in the off seasons and on the off weeks we have another podcast that's just mike and i raw conversation unedited and that's called the liturgist conversations available to our patrons thank you so much everybody we hope you have a great holiday and a great new year we'll see you in january we hope you enjoy this last installment of our suffering series here we go so the first episode of the suffering trilogy we talked about sort of other people's suffering in a sort of a third person you know like big issues how do we engage them you know how do we help those people how do we hear their stories the second one we kind of went first person and and really kind of looked at the suffering in ourselves and how do we engage it and how do we you know use contemplation use meditation ideas um to kind of be present and and see suffering through a different lens and it kind of takes some of its power away and we've got this third episode and i think we like to shift the the focus a little bit towards a second person sort of a you when you when you encounter somebody that's in suffering that is your you know not just a third person stranger but somebody that you really love and and you know your family members your friends because i think about those the first couple episodes and how we encountered suffering you know like mike if you come to me and you're really in pain about something uh it's a beautiful story when you have these people washing each other washing these strangers feet but if you come and tell me something and i get down and try to wash your feet just it's weird or like i i write you a check for 25 or so you know what i mean it's not the same uh how do you how or at the same token even the personal way like we talked about sort of how to see suffering in a different light and if i automatically just try to get you to see your suffering in a different light and say well you just you know see it different where's the where is it where's the potential benefit of it in your life or where you know is it that can actually be harmful to the relationship into you or you know in that second person so i just wanted to take a second and like we've got a story that we had with a friend of ours named dave that i think is interesting in this context but mike do you have any thoughts about how do you engage in suffering or how do you react to it and be present with those in your life that are suffering in a healthy way yeah i've really been having to practice that lately we talked about a little bit last episode but uh there was this incredible outpouring after the election from people like super grieved in our audience but then there were people in my life who were grieved i have one friend in particular and she's hispanic and she was getting text messages from her mom that says well have you been deported yet because she's mixed race and uh her white mother you know was like i effectively and completely disregard the validity of your suffering i dismiss the your basic right to suffer which is it's just incredibly painful erasure i think when i was younger i had a tendency whenever people would come to me and they would talk about anything unpleasant or difficult or hard i always wanted to rush to the problem when i learned about a redemptive perspective on suffering uh it was always my tendency to um offer you know frankel's work prescriptively as but instead of reflectively yeah and now i've learned that it's like essential to sit and wait and listen and let people get it the most important thing might be a safe person who listens you don't have to say anything most of the time you know i found like whenever i do q a at events a lot of times people just want to get the thing out they don't even need an answer they just need someone to honor what's in their heart and that's really validated by psychology and neuroscience that that this need we have when we have trauma stored in our brains and it produces a suffering we have to massage out the amygdala response and the other parts of the brain that process trauma we have to minimize those responses and the only way to do that is to talk about our heartache and our pain and our struggle and our suffering with someone who listens and doesn't further traumatize us and i think the the pragmatic the amer great american pragmatism which in so many ways is is beautiful and effective in this case just creates a suffering vortex a spiral that people can't get out of i think of friends of mine that and even lisa is is so good uh with people when they're in pain and i have friends that are really good at it and friends that are not good at it i don't think i'm great at a lot of times and by good at it i mean like i just my tendency is to be prescriptive is to be not even prescriptive is i want i want to help so i'm i operate in my own life with ideas and big ideas and i've learned enough to not just throw those ideas at people but in that absence of doing that sometimes i don't even know what to do i feel like i shouldn't say something to try to fix this so what do i do [Laughter] lisa so just to reveal myself as a hypocrite a guy came up to me on the book tour and he said i just want to thank you for creating the space for good conversations and with and not always rushing to a prescription uh because i struggled with a lot of depression and i still struggle with suicidal tendencies and the space you create is really valuable to me and i immediately said like um do you have someone you can talk to about those impulses yes and then started talking about like ways to cope with suicidal tendencies and he started laughing which was very gracious of him he's like i don't actually need a prescription i was thanking you for not being prescriptive and i think that's the tension we all i think are when our empathy is provoked we do want to help yeah and sometimes we need to moderate that impulse and maybe say is there anything i can do to help or after you know someone has said what they need to say uh would my thoughts be helpful to you right now and and i think just as simple as asking permission or seeing if it's palatable or not and then not being offended if it isn't maybe people just need to share and that that's the best thing you can offer them i want to play this story that from dave there's something about physical presence that i've learned and been too slow in in my own life with other people sometimes i like i can think of when when we had lucy and we were in the hospital and found out she had down syndrome and heart defects and we were freaking out uh we didn't know what we were gonna do and we had friends i mean everybody that found out about it was loving and kind and generous but there were friends that you could tell like you know they'd send a message or let us know if it's convenient to come up to the hospital or for you know we don't want to be and which is f i resp that's what i would be like i wouldn't respect people's face but then we had a friend this guy daniel for instance that has been a friend for a long time we haven't been super close the last several years but he heard and he lived like an hour and a half away almost two hours away from where we were at and he heard i didn't even text him i didn't even call him just he just came he just showed up at the hospital and just gave us a big hug and brought and just was there with the girls kissing the girls or and like there's something about he's one of the masters that i think of in my world and as far as engaging people in suffering he just i don't think there's a a prescription even in this like our tendency my attendance even this conversation how do you prescribe to not prescribe what to do um but there's some people i don't know there's just like a mastery of knowing how when is it appropriate to move in even beyond people's comfort zone and just get in there and give them a bear hug and don't let go um and when is it appropriate to give space and you know that's something sometimes i i have a hard time gauging but i do know that physical presence just him being there and just his touch and his listening ear can be so much and so meaningful just to let people not feel alone and literally that's it no no like fixing maybe not even listening maybe not even talking about it just being in the room and that can feel uncomfortable but on the receiving end of that that's been powerful to me and that's what i love about this story with dave how he's in this like strange predicament of you know what is the correct social thing to do with someone in the sex industry what are do i can i be some sort of savior or can i bring some sort you know can i should i tell her to fix her life or to do something else with her life should i accept what she said rather than like dealing with that just kind of being there and just being with her without any plan i don't know it humanizes the situation in some way [Music] a couple years ago i was in thailand i was playing for this conference there's a conference for a whole lot of young people who are overseas and they are spreading the gospel to people that maybe haven't been told about it before this is dave campbell he is a doctor of musical arts and a professional cellist a word of caution this story includes some themes that might not be suitable for younger listeners but it's a good story group itself it was a bit of a strange vibe you know my experience like i bring my world view to it but i can also see like i can recognize that these are these are essentially like good people who are really keen on dedicating an enormous amount of energy and time and effort into doing something that they really think is like the pursuit of something good and uh and i i acknowledge that too even if i also think that they might be inadvertently doing violence to other people anyway i'm over in thailand and we're playing this stuff and it is kind of weirding me out i did i grew up going to church but it was like a really really liberal denomination it was like all the leadership positions were like middle-aged ladies and i had like gay pastors and we had like it was a it was a pretty different vibe than than something canadians it's a different kind of place than some other places that i've seen now i guess that's my that's my spiritual world view that i grew up with and i kind of grew away from it and went to college and kind of just like stopped so you're in thailand lost all of that but in the middle of a very conservative yeah so i mean yeah i mean sort of this weird environment is definitely making me feel strange and and before we had gone over um when they were booking dates um the offer was extended like hey you can stay longer if you want like if you've never been to thailand so it's like great clear my calendar for a few days and i stay i'm booking to stay like an extra four days and yeah we're in this conference it's a little strange uh and even where we are is strange because the hotel is on the end of this road you go down this road and it's all just like late night after hours clubs massage parlors ladyboy bars red light district yeah i don't even know if it was the only one or even if it qualifies as the most intense one there but anyway they're just some very bizarre juxtapositions after playing at the conference dave and some of his friends decided to hit the town and so we'd go out and then you just sort of enter into another bizarre thing which is like now we're hanging out in a bar on the main drag that's just full of people from other countries that basically look like me like white western men hanging out and the bars will just operate on this model where there's like one owner or manager who's there and then all the people that are serving you yeah they don't work for the bar but they work in the bar they're just like serving drinks and stuff because they are there as like freelancers looking for guys and they're sex trade workers looking for guys so we're hanging out at this one bar the girls are like hey what do you want to drink and they'll be like okay we'll go get you a beer and then they come back and they're just sort of chatting at you and in my head i'm sort of running like which is like which is the more polite option to just like politely make conversation or to politely acknowledge that like that conversation is not gonna lead to any form of uh solicitation i don't wanna waste your time or something like that so we kind of said something gently in that direction of like hey like you know we're just grabbing a drink and then we're actually we gotta you know go do stuff [Music] one night i'm just like okay i need to escape from conference land again and i go out and um i meet some of these kids they're traveling from europe and they're just sort of like out backpacking across the world and it's fun and and we go to go back to the same bar again so now i'm like inside this bar and i'm like this is a strange experience that i've not had before i've got these like young dutch kids that are there and all these girls and the bar owner and that kind of stuff the girls are just like we're gonna take you guys out for like late night party time we're gonna go out clubbing or whatever the young guys are like turning to me looking at me like hey like is this a good idea is this a bad idea is it safe and i'm like i have no idea like i just i don't know i've i'm like so aware of how my world view is so tiny that i have no idea like what is up and what is down here we end up going out we're taking like those tuk-tuk motorcycle taxis around town and going to these late night clubs and it's it's bizarre you walk into one of these places and it'll be like 400 people in this club and like 300 of them are like thai girls and like 100 of them are bros from every other country in the world we finally get out of there end of the night i'm like i need to get back to the hotel it's late my cell phone's dead i'm like trying to remember how to like navigate my way back through the city and so one of the girls that is sort of like the ringleader of this group this part of the story i always like stumble over because of her name which i i want to like honor her name so i just don't leave the name out even though it always brings this strange part of the conversation so her name is poon which is just like i'm like an evil person for laughing at this right it's like i am a child i am a child here i no this is like her name like her name and we've like i don't know somebody stole this name a long time ago and was like hey you know that'd be a great name for oh my gosh um she's just like yeah come out for my birthday i'm like yeah i can do this because what happens is i'm staying for these extra days i am just in this spiral of darkness of just like i'm in this place that is like at once like incredibly beautiful and vibrant and there's like these sacred spaces around the city and and incredible music and and food and all this stuff and it's just so dark i'm like here with this group that's just here to do the thing that it does and i'm living on the end of a red light district street and i am the quintessential like white guy that's here with money that here is worth a lot of money and is i'm just like a parasite consuming dave and all his new friends are having a great time together and poon informs dave that it's going to be her birthday in a couple of days and invites him back to the bar the next night to celebrate anyway so it's like the end of the evening the the manager and her and her boyfriend are there and they want to go out for late night food and uh poon wants me to go with her and the four of us were going to go together for like late night food so we're going to scoot across town to go there it's like maybe like a 10 or 15 minute scoot to get there the manager and her boyfriend are on one scooter and then i've got my scooter and so poon hops on the back of my scooter and now i'm scooting across chiang mai and i am just like i am a white dude on a scooter at three in the morning with like a tiny thai girl in a really small cocktail dress sex worker yeah just hanging on the back of me on the scooter and i'm like no one in their right mind would think that we were anything except exactly that there's something in me that is just really ashamed of that and i'm like oh no no like i'm almost like wanting to explain as i'm riding by people like no no no it's it's not that but then there's this other thing inside me that is like you are a jerk for essentially like failing to acknowledge her like whatever it is she does she's also a human being that is going out to food with you right now and like a jerk wants to explain away why she would even be there in the first place and i'm like i need to get over that feeling right now as we're scooting there it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourself or feeling connected to the people that we love better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house and you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through better help you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions better help has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com slash liturgists okay so through the night all the other girls paired off and left and went and did stuff and poon i don't know whether she just like didn't chose not to do that or i i don't really know but anyway she's still there and um progressively through the night she starts bringing up like hey like can i stay with you tonight and at first i'm just kind of like that hadn't been on the table at all and i kind of like laugh at first and then she like asks again i'm like no and um she just keeps persisting i guess i have to be like really direct right now um i'm just like i will not sleep with you i will not pay you for sex please stop asking kind of forcefully and like she's just like no no it's not that like i just want to stay with you which i'm assuming is something that you could totally say if you wanted to then leverage that into more than just staying with you but i'm just like ah i don't know just keeps asking just keeps asking one of her friends is just like no she just like she has this thing where she can't stay by herself like either she works the night and is somewhere or if she's not with somebody that night she like has this thing where she like can't handle staying by herself she always has to stay with one of her friends which is like its own like sadness and darkness that i'm like how do you unpack that i don't i don't because i'm not able to i'm just like why do you want to do this and she's just like well tomorrow morning is my actual birthday and if i stay with you then we can go out and do stuff like for my birthday so i can't tell you exactly what it was that made me be like okay like i'll set this boundary like we are not going to engage in like a sexual exchange but yes you can stay with me i had my bed and then there was the other bed from one of the other dudes that had already gone home from the band and i was just like okay we can do that and i just kept clarifying like that's all that it would be it wraps up everybody's gonna go home poon gets back on the scooter with me and like the the bar manager she goes off another way with with her with her guy and now we're gonna scoop back to her apartment which is inside the center of the old city she wants to get clothes and stuff for the next day she's like can we stop there first before we go to your hotel yeah for sure so we're scooting there and uh i'm still feeling this kind of we i'm feeling the same weird thing i was feeling before of trying to get my ego out of the way of how i'm interacting with this person and like my western canadian concepts of shame or like all this stuff right we pull up to her little place and um she hops off the back of it and she's like about to just run inside and get her clothes and she like turns back and she's just like you're not gonna leave me are you and i'm just like no she's like you won't really just leave right now and i realized this is just a person who would assume that i would just bounce out of there because she's carrying around her own construct too of like who she is and what our relationship is to one another and that kind of stuff and my heart is like racing because i'm like wow i'm about to bring a sex trade worker back to my hotel full of evangelical christians that have hired me to come [Laughter] i am so i am so scared for the moment when i'm waiting in the elevator to like go up to the room and i'm in the lobby and i'm just like hopefully someone's going for a really early morning run right now that would be great but i have this moment right i have this moment where i get this peaceful clarity for the first time through this whole experience and it manifests in a really funny way for me which is like i never had like a what would jesus do bracelet when i was growing up that was like not part of my equation and yet i'm like in this moment that's like exactly the thing i would love to have on my wrist right now just like in my tumultuous brain and emotional experience to just like look at that and just be like oh that's where i need my spirit to be right now and uh this kind of occurs to me and it just sort of washes over me and like the anxiety level just like fades down and my brain just gets quieter and i realize that it's just like all the stuff that's making me freak out about this this is all just ego self-image fear things that i just don't need to worry about and in the end it's like this is just a human being who is really lonely who i have some kind of connection with and i don't even i couldn't define it or explain it completely or even pretend that i fully understood it and yet in that moment i'm just like what i need to do is just wait for this girl to come out from her place and and we're gonna go back to the hotel so she comes back out jumps on the scooter we go to the hotel i definitely am sweating a couple bullets waiting for the elevator to go up go upstairs to the room uh she's just like i'm gonna shower she jumps in the shower and i'm kind of sitting in a chair in the bedroom just like reflecting on it like this is kind of nuts what's happening right now and uh she pops out of the shower she gets dressed we're like talking for a couple minutes and we're like deciding what we're gonna do in the morning or whatever and i just like get into bed and she gets into the other bed and then she's just like can i sleep with you and i'm just like man like we talked about this so much and i'm trying to so i'm just like i don't know and she's like no not sex like i just wanna can i please just sleep with you and this what would jesus do bracelet part of my soul is just like sure [Laughter] and you lost the evangelicals um i'm scared but i'm but yeah i was just like yeah yeah she gets out of the other bed and she like hops into my bed and now she's like i'm in bed like cuddling with a thai sex trade worker you know i keep saying things like and it was blowing my mind or whatever in that moment it really just it didn't blow my mind i was just like this just is what it is and this is like i don't know i was fairly at peace about it and and had a few more like really surreal thoughts and emotional experiences and then eventually i just fell asleep it's like five in the morning [Music] so i wake up in the morning and she's moved back she's in the other bed i get up have a shower and like get dressed and [Music] we go out and we hang out for for her birthday and just kind of like wander around in the town a little bit and it's kind of cool and so i flew out i think it was the day after that i i flew back to the united states and i checked out of the hotel and i turned in my scooter and then i'm like i guess like if you're leaving somewhere you like say bye to your friends so i'm like with my stuff swing by power bar to be like goodbye 70 year old owner and bar manager and other sex trade workers yeah so i'm just like well it was really fun and crazy and strange and weird and awful and and i'm going home and and poon is there she seems like she's sort of like like torn a little bit by this experience and and then she's just like can i i'm gonna come to the airport with you so we just have like this like silent ride in a cab she like rides out to the airport with me and then she like says bye and i like load in my bags and stuff go through security and and then i flew home so what did you take away from the experience yeah i would i would say so like sitting on the scooter when that calm sort of came over me i think what came with great clarity was like all these seeds that had been planted the life the church i grew up in and and and then grew away from and and then inadvertently like tumbling into this like evangelical american art world all these things kind of set the stage for this moment where i was able to realize that i'm like there's like zero percent of me at this moment in time who has any faith in a literal creation or or a real noah and a flood or abrahamic sacrifice or or a jesus that was for sure some dude and that who like died and rolled a rock out of the way and flew into outer space or like whatever like all that stuff i'm just like oh my gosh like there's just nothing in me that has faith in that and yet there's this huge part of me that has deep deep faith in all of these teachings and it's almost like once i strip away all of that other stuff and i'm left with the teachings that i can just believe in and have faith in without it being at all connected to like you have to believe this that and whatever it becomes like radiantly beautiful and compelling to me and i'm just like this is an amazing way to live a beautiful and just life [Music] you referred to the story before you told it to us as your road to damascus story yeah that was very funny after hearing that you wrote the sleeping with a sex worker in thailand but like literally sleeping yeah literally not like colloquially yeah no sex no sex but well really yeah seeing the humanity of a sex worker in thailand yes and then and then getting over myself you know equally large hurdle maybe even larger hurdle than the seeing part is like yo get over yourself the shame of of having her on the back of the scooter that was because of me thinking about other people thinking about me you know like that's because there were other people in the street i think so much of the anxieties we have come down to being social primates people all cope with that uh need for presence and proximity with other members of our species in different ways and there's like there's so many really human tragedies in that whole system like one that there are people who because of the way their life has developed the way they've been taught they're not able to find um symmetric pair bonded loving relationships in their community or they've been like hyped up to the point where such a relationship lacks some uh tantalizing factor that their brain has been conditioned to need likely through something like frequent pornography consumption and so they it becomes like the economically viable solution to that issue if we step up a level from a social primate is to get on a metal tube and traverse half of the planet to a weaker economy where because the economy is so much weaker people have found a way to get survival resources is to mine their own bodies really treating their own bodies as a resource which we all do to some degree but this is just a much more visceral way to do that and yet in that backdrop among the function and dysfunction of those kind of bondings uh those are also social primates anyone can get this sort of loneliness which we can we can ex we can talk about on an existential level but what's driving it is the way humans need to be around other humans the way kind of crave oxytocin and we crave that experience and so like what happened the middle of this whole story is like all the meta constructs kind of got pushed out of the way slowly and then it was left with just that shared need like the the need that's even deeper than the sexual need and that's for social primates to be together and then somehow the peeling away of all those layers of the onion is very similar to what like i totally get how that becomes a faith experience for you because for me it's like those moments that i feel god's presence most profoundly are those times when all the constructs just kind of kind of part like the red sea in the exodus story and you're just kind of more directly to relating to what is instead of passing it through millions of filters and perspectives you're just being [Music] one of the things you were just saying in there it's like i remember poon telling me that um she was the youngest of nine children living on like a subsistence rice farming patty south of chiang mai and then eventually she just ran away from home because she was just tired of always starving that gives you a new angle to look at somebody who entered into the sex trade that speaks to me so much about how we we tend to push aside or ignore the fact to which so many human societal problems are driven by need so like i look down my nose i don't i don't look down my nose at the sex workers at all at all but i look down my nose at westerners who go and kind of exploit this economy but then in a couple days i get on an airplane and i go home and the first thing i do is hug my wife and then hug my daughters i don't have this aching loneliness or need for connection so it's really like it's pretty ignorant of me to look down my nose at them without looking at the underlying need and the problem and how they're they themselves are coping with a trauma and that that's what i mean like when you look at all these issues that's that's the reason things get so complex for me is if you really start to look at the drives and motivations of people most people are operating in something that's at least vaguely reasonable from their perspective in almost any situation yeah so it helps you not demonize people into just incomprehensible beasts but the dangers i suppose of relativism in that way is that you can get stuck into apathy of my life just like acceptance like and that's like that was a challenge for sure as feeling is like okay i gotta step back and try to take all these lenses of like the meme the way that i'm seeing it try to like take those away but then also be like but i don't know that i want to end up in a place where eventually i'm like well they're going to judge you can't judge anything and like i get stuck there a lot because that there is real exploitation and real yeah injustice and real evil so that's why empathy becomes extremely important and that's why the development of consciousness and story and becomes very important because everybody's when you're looking at your own world and that only everybody's got good motivations for the most part everyone wants to feed their families everyone wants to be connected everyone wants to be safe that's what everybody wants so learning to see empathetically of how are my actions influencing people that aren't right directly in my view learning to think of a story that's a little bigger than just me and my family or just me and my party or just me and my socioeconomic class and race and whatever unless you can start seeing larger things this is how this is how large destructive movements like how the sex trade becomes this terrible force in the world of keeping people dehumanized and lessening humanity so i think there's something about that even within your experience yes it's being free of yourself but to me like seeing with empathy so you're just like as you're describing that i'm hearing like this really big thing a really sweeping big topic and then it's and then so for me it's almost like there in that moment it was there was also this acknowledgement that it's just like this is a drop in the ocean and like what is the ocean but a collection of drops so there's this huge thing that i can't fully understand and i don't see all the moving parts and it's really difficult to like wade my way through it intellectually and emotionally and socially and that kind of thing and that is true and then there's also this other thing that is true which is like it's like here i am in this moment and i'm presented with the option of like how do i want to relate to this other human being and then there's this model of how to behave and how to relate to the other that i'm steeped in that is like the christian narrative and from that i make like my best guess and it's just like how about respond to a person expressing loneliness and need why don't i respond to them with compassion and caring and non-judgment and trust it's like at least i can do that i used to think sharing in jesus suffering was just a sad cliche used to manipulate our emotions but when we suffer we are stripped to a vulnerable state and it makes us feel our weakness and our frailty and this can be a powerful source of connection with another person or with a community jean vanier says weakness recognized accepted and offered is at the heart of belonging so it is at the heart of communion with another and the times i've experienced suffering with another when we have walked through it together it's been incredibly bonding i feel like i was given a gift of really seeing the fullness of humanity and didn't know what a forced love was until i actually suffered when we suffer we have nothing to offer someone else so we're brought to the root of love just being present with someone just sitting with them and caring for them as they suffer aristotle said that when you admire someone you put them on a pedestal but when you love someone you want to be with them [Music] all right so all this stuff that we've been hearing about it's overwhelming obviously and but i think there's an interesting difference between pain and suffering and i think in the west especially we conflate the two and sometimes don't know what we're talking about because it's possible to have pain and to not suffer i've experienced that personally and then you can just see it and you can see somebody who has gone through you know let's say who has a terminal illness or something and they're in physical pain and some people are in tremendous suffering and despair about it and others there's the pain there's the same amount of pain but there's a different way of it of experiencing that pain and too far lesser degrees i've i've experienced that in my own life where i've been i've gone through painful painful experiences where the suffering was lighter and i've gone through what should be really joyful experiences you know getting recognition from people or whatever and in the middle of it i'm suffering because there's something about it that is still not satisfying you know and they're great suffering within it so that difference between pain and suffering when you think of it in terms of attachment and you think of it in terms of how a person relates to their circumstances rather than simply the circumstances themselves pain is a circumstance suffering is how you respond to circumstance it's the attachment to the circumstance so in that case it's hard to see like how what can you do about suffering but the suffering within yourself you can do a lot about pain we can do a lot to alleviate pain in ourselves and in others but suffering on some levels your suffering is kind of out of my hands what do you feel about that well obviously i'm going to go it depends on in which context you're using those terms right i think there's tremendous merit to that personalized view of suffering i think if you've learned how to deal with suffering it can be you can help others suffer less by sharing how you did that i think victor frankel would be a great example of someone who learned a way of addressing his own suffering and then taught others to do so well and in doing so helped other people suffer less yeah yeah yeah but you have to be looking within a certain context related to suffering i've heard some humanists speak of necessary and unnecessary suffering which is relatively similar to the pain versus suffering dichotomy you just used um and so they would say that we would address unnecessary suffering like you know the lack of vaccination and and health care for children in lower income nations that would be unnecessary suffering or high poverty rates in wealthy nations like the united states united states would be unnecessary suffering um but whereas necessary suffering would be like you got your heart broken by the first girl you liked right that's not unnecessary suffering that's like that really helps you grow as a person i think i think the problem for me these days is being such a see every perspective person i have trouble thinking of almost any phrase that i can't think of helpful and unhelpful context to place it in and so the thing i'm always careful with was saying you know um you all the only suffering you can address is your own uh especially for someone who comes from i come from like the most socially and economically advanced group in human history so i have to be careful projecting that onto another group especially i would think in the case of people who are still very young uh it's it's more difficult for a child to separate from their circumstances than someone in their 70s and that distinction between pain and suffering may be significantly less and even i who i consider myself as someone who's done a lot of self-development work but my ability to detach from suffering really starts to subside if i skip a meal or if i'm in physical pain so i have a tremendous capacity to deal with emotional pain and distance myself from that but physical pain really uh cuts directly into my psyche yeah almost immediately and that's a result of my of my context and the fact that i'm you know kind of a hedonist but um it's it's such a tough thing to say because at the end of the i mean i'm a pizza i'm a pizza hedonist basically i mean i'm not really hedonist in anything but pizza but well that's not true i the second part of hedonism the avoiding of suffering as in physical discomfort i'm all about yeah you've been to my house you've seen my recliners you know i sit down on a cloud and press a button and i'm lying on a cloud and there's just no physical discomfort at all and you know you enjoy a good romp with all the old honey badger that's also true about actually finding uh uh the road life has has really led to a lot of romping so [Laughter] it's like i'm home but i mean that's exactly what i'm saying um how how much could i say that i can detach myself from my circumstances and not suffer because i have like i'm not hungry very often i have easy access to social affirmation through friends to social affirmation through my mate through mating with my mate like all the hierarchy of needs for me uh check check check check we're good uh and so i think to talk about suffering for someone who's at the top of maslow's hierarchy means you have to try to other help other people get those same things i think it's easier to speak of a detachment from suffering or separating pain and suffering circumstances if you're speaking as someone who is tremendously economically or socially disadvantaged that's me it's you know me i'm just all about systems these days i'm losing the ability to evaluate claims from some hypothetical individual perspective and i always acknowledge the system that i'm in and the system that i perpetuate which could be bullshit it's just how i'm seeing things lately no i don't think it's bullshit but obviously you cut out the individual experience you cut something out of reality you cut out the systemic experience and reality you got something out of reality it's to see the whole picture you need both and any no any infinite other reference frames to see the whole picture um but the one thing that you said about the human is some some humanists delineation between necessary and unnecessary suffering that to me is like a that would be like a super arrogant position to hold to me how could you how can you say what's necessary and unnecessary how could you say to the person that went through horrendous injustice but what it did for them in their how it turned to good for them in their own personal lives that that wasn't of value you know like who are you to judge that distinguishing that doesn't make any sense to me and as far as alleviating i think that we can live in a way that others that suffering is alleviated don't misunderstand me from what i said before um i just think you can't control it so i think we we have this ability to like dave was present with poon in a way i think that they're probably in that something in there there was some suffering that was alleviated i think presence i think giving people clean water there is suffering that's alleviated but it's any anything that we do i think you can have this bend of your heart and of your life to try to alleviate suffering what i'm saying is i think the most we have control over well i guess if you go farther down the rabbit hole we don't have control over anything in my perspective but uh i'm with you there you're dealing yeah you're dealing with alleviating pain in and how i would define the terms um that's you can you can directly like take your hand out of the fire that's alleviating pain and you can you can take your neighbor's hand out of the fire or you can put out the fire but how that person experiences their hand burning is that's the individual side of this conversation that's the how you know if my hands burning there's the physical sensation of it yes but if my hands burning i'll tell you i'm going to be freaked out because i also know am i going to be able to play guitar anymore and am i going to be able to hold my babies anymore and there's all these other things that my hand means to me than just the physical sensation there's this whole other world connected to my hands so the burning of hands is not just physical sensation it's not just pain it's the potential wounding of my life and changing of my life and what i think my life is and should be and in that regard i don't think that the response to suffering therefore is to try to just become so detached that um you don't care about wanting to touch your babies anymore it's simply navigating with your suffering how how how much how much suffering if i didn't suffer at all i wouldn't create anything we wouldn't make this podcast without a degree of suffering which wouldn't help other people in their suffering then you know so there's like this this balance between compassion and suffering and what you see in jesus is the willingness to suffer out of compassion and i think that's fascinating and beautiful and and willing to even the whole idea of the incarnation and then when i hear about how mystics are this is there's this guy i can't remember his name he lived in this cave and people would just come visit him and it's kind of the way they describe it he would just kind of with every breath go into the unattached bliss of oneness with the divine and the brahman and the atman and then in compassion come back and be present with you and that was like the dance in and out in and out in and out suffering in order like sharing in our suffering in order to be present with us in order for compassion and love to thrive and for creativity to exist and the world to be but at the same time having the ability to breathe back into the broader awareness where no suffering exists where everything's okay and kind of living in both of those planes at the same time somehow that's super meta [Music] i had some somewhere i was going to take it but then you went so meta the analogy i was going to use just ceased to apply at all i guess going back to the hands on fire the seculars would say unnecessary suffering is when you set your neighbor's hand on fire yeah you know what i mean like but would volitionally creating suffering in anybody ever be necessary why would you want to break somebody's heart yeah but people do and then they they do it they do it uh systemically without thinking about it the truth of what you said can and has at some points in history been twisted to justify some pretty terrible things by saying we're giving people the gift of suffering um jeez you see what i mean so you right so you take like this that's what i mean like so people take that idea and they twist it just a little bit and they just become real assholes and cause unmatched well but do you see like what i was saying is you can't create or destroy suffering you can't volitionally create or destroy suffering yeah so someone takes a slightly different definition of suffering and then go create it or justify its creation and and what you would say is they're creating pain that's fine use that word they're creating pain um and i don't think there's ever a volitionally viable oh i guess like surgery or something taking out if you're creating pain in order to help there would be a very limited you know taking the splinter out of amelie's foot anything that creates pain must involve the consent of the other and i think that's the problem is we very often do things that create pain and others without their consent oh okay what about a person that is physically attacking someone on the street and you can't restrain them without hurting them in some way yeah well they're they're violating the other person's consent and creating pain uh so i think you should take kind of the least the least painful means of stopping that person but that person must be stopped right but you're still creating pain without consent yeah absolutely you're creating pain in order to alleviate pain right in that scenario any good creation of pain a surgery a whatever a restraint of violence the hope is to eliminate more pain than you're creating right i'm saying we create pain just so we have more comfortable shoes for less money or we create pain so that our televisions cost less that's what i'm saying like there's systemic export of pain right now from from high income nations to low-income nations that the outcome of that pain is suffering yeah and i don't want to lecture those people who are suffering about how they manage their pain when i perpetuate a system that creates the pain in the first place oh i finally said it in an articulate way oh yeah of course oh that felt good yeah that why would you ever lecture someone else on their suffering i wouldn't but what i don't want is for someone to hear this podcast and think that's what we're doing oh that was all a very long disclaimer [Laughter] this is what happens when i don't have a conversation tree i just have to like work it out in real time like a normal person yeah of course for the love of god please don't use any of those words or ideas to minimize someone's suffering or justify your own creation of their pain that would be the worst perversion of these ideas possible it just happens all the time that's what that's what i'm getting at like what you're saying is so true i totally affirm the trueness but it also gets screwed up in the real world all the time as does you know love your enemy as does oh totally turn your other cheek you know so is it any beautiful any beautiful truth does um but i just think there is a beautiful truth to be mined here about even just for individuals and how you respond to what how what you're facing in your life you've been diagnosed with a disease you are treated as lesser than you're brutalized by the police you're you're paid less than your male counterparts whatever the thing is we gotta fight for the world to be better we got to fight for the hands to be taken out of the fire but at the same time for you and for me how can i relate to my suffering how can you relate to your suffering in a way that helps you thrive and have compassion and be alive within the suffering and you don't have to let your pain be interpreted one for one as suffering i guess that's what i'm getting at you can find ways of um and this is just an encouragement to myself and to to all of us who we're we're suffering that's what our lives consist of partially is suffering but it's possible to flow within suffering to use suffering to create art for example to create uh cup space for conversation space for p for healing space for others suffering it's possible to transcend and and place your awareness in a spot that sees the hand burning and is not the hand itself burning if that makes any sense i feel like hand burning is a bad analogy that is a bad announcement because it's my i just i don't know if i'll ever meditate enough or i won't freak out if my hand catches on fire it's so like i literally my hand keeps twinging because i keep imagining it on fire and so i have trouble connecting with your saying i'm like could you ever detach yourself from your hand being on fire and just observe it and not suffer and i just think i would i just think i would scream it's true but like when i like picked the wrong answer more more like when i fell down the steps in your backyard and my foot hurt so bad because i i broke it that level of pain i was after a little while able to kind of step away from and just observe as pain um and say well this is just a thing this is just it's just a sensation and it was serious pain it's like maybe the worst pain i've had in my life and i was ultimately able to relate to it on its terms because i was you know well if my foot's broken i can't un-break my foot i can't magically heal my foot you see what i mean yeah any i mean i feel like any physical pain issues is like yoda level shit it's like jedi master you you have complete control of your conscious mind to go wherever and identify wherever you want the physical pain but sort of entry level pain would be like i didn't get to eat dessert tonight you know what i mean all right how about how about something like how about uh there were two there were too many commercial breaks in my show that's a real good one and you can either you can at times i mean but even that for me out that sometimes that'll like it'll get me it'll pull me especially like hulu i'm paying up 7.99 a month or whatever it is for it and she'll give me a commercial like no [Music] let me ask you this and how it affects pain versus suffering yeah you know how you buy a new car let's say you bought a brand new um chevy sonic i was trying to think of a terrible car now i feel bad for anyone who has a chevy sonic i'm sorry i called your car terrible how about a pt how about a pt cruiser pt cruiser terrible car absolutely if you have a pt cruiser i'm sorry your car is terrible so you have a brand new pt cruiser and you drive around and suddenly you notice p2 cruisers everywhere you know what i'm talking about so i have a brain injury so now it feels like all the time i meet other people with brain injuries and they very often make me grateful for how not that bad my brain injury is because my dad his brain injury is way worse than mine and uh i heard a a methodist pastor preaching a couple days ago and she was incredible but she had a stroke and this ability to place pain in a context and not suffer is related to the functioning of our brain so what about people who who either injury or birth lack the neurological capacity to make that transition because we still can't control someone else's suffering but i guess maybe we should just do our best to address their pain well do you think the people that lack the neurological dis distance from their do you do you think they suffer like most people do my dad suffers a lot and he doesn't you know he doesn't have the same ability he used to to change his mental posture readily you know like my dad he'll just walk away from the refrigerator and leave it open or wash his hands and leave the water open running or my favorite thing he'll call you and just hang up when he's done talking because he never says goodbye anymore and don't get me wrong he's recovered really well he's fun to be around um but his ability to put his own pain into some kind of context is radically diminished or even i'll give a more extreme example uh uh henry malaysian you know this classic brain surgery patient who had no ability to form long-term memories and so uh you know if he was if he had some physical ailment he would just constantly be exposed to it all new and if someone told him you know treatment strategies or or you know try anything hold your breath whatever he couldn't remember it long enough he'd just revert back into the pain and therefore the suffering well but why therefore the suffering see to me because the suffering is born out of the constructs that you have of your future and or your past and it falls into some constructed space the pain is not just the pain but it's it's how its relationship to those two forecasting your your other self that you see in the future of your past or it's not just a present moment thing i don't know how suffering can exist within just a present moment then it's just pain well i think you could make a case there's a lot of people with brain injuries who can still foresee things as differently than they are or for example i know as i've talked to a lot of people with brain injuries who remember how they once were and long for it um i mean i know it really bothers me that if i'm not careful about how many conversations i have in one day i can't have any more [Laughter] and because of the the depth of my brain injury i'm able to just say well this is i'm discovering a new me this new me is a is a different me than which everyone does it's just got a little more dramatic after your brain bleeds inside but for other people they have that that awareness of diminished capacity and they could foresee what it would be like to not have it anymore but they don't have enough mental horsepower left to uh give themselves an internal contact shift like we're talking about well to to just what kind of brain injury could result in somebody not being able to just be present in a single moment that seems like fundamental to existence it's a baby again that's a couch it just is yeah anything that involves a lot of damage to either infarction or trauma to the prefrontal can really affect that ability to be present because you're you're the the very part of your brain that's responsible for focus or attention is damaged so you pop around uncontrollably that's horrible that's what that's what happens to my dad that's what i mean that's why i'll just in the middle like you know taking some out of the fridge just walk away with the refrigerator open because it just got lost i didn't have some deeper point i was just thinking about suffering in that context yeah that's that's that's rough i've been spending a lot of time in um in brain injury survivor forums well but then you i mean the farther you go down that rabbit trail again going back to our zero control of anything anyway saying you have the control of what your pain is and how it's related or your suffering is in relation to your pain on some level that's an illusion anyway everybody's brain is already what it is and they're not going to be present in the moment because that's not what was programmed to happen or whatever so we're assuming some baseline ability to build a lie of agency that you can feed yourself i can totally get behind that [Laughter] well because this podcast that they were going to listen to that they've already listened to that they already have always will and always are listening to uh was part of what led their brain to do what it was going to do with the suffering anyway you know i mean it's just all i do so we're just going through the dance [Music] oh man that's true [Applause] and all the calvinists are like yeah [Music] i had a pastor say once like always go always do so in other words if you're like oh something happens should i go yes but that doesn't mean like make a nuisance or crowd yourself if you get there's a lot of people like take a card and leave a card with a nurse or whoever and say you came by and you're thinking of them if you think i wonder if i should mow their yard yeah go mow their yard don't even think about it but you know that always go always do doesn't mean to insert yourself into the situation so if you go and there's no one there yeah go in if they're if they don't say no visitors and and make your presence known give a hug but you don't have to say anything you can just sit with people and uh and it doesn't have to be very long and i thought that was a good ethos that i've tried to to emulate in my own life and follow the idea that action is always helpful the idea that presence is always helpful as long as you're not um an invader yeah yeah but like you say it's even hard to know like should i knock should i go in and sometimes it is true especially people you know fairly well uh if they stay beyond your comfort zone like when i grieve i vanish i i literally try to find physical distance from everybody and uh after my grandfather died i was literally like hiding behind the funeral home hoping no one would figure out where i was and of course my dad went searching for me because he knows me and i remember when i heard dad approaching i was like i don't want to be with anybody right now but he comes up and he get he puts his arms around me and of course you know i just go to pieces because it's what i needed it's not what i wanted and uh that's a tough thing i mean human brains and humans we're we're strange creatures i mean when it comes to those kind of feelings we're almost feline in our uh oppositional energies of like you know i really want to be alone but actually no that that's quite nice and i think you just have to be willing to take the risk of being emotionally vulnerable and understanding there may be some rejection as people are going through their difficulty i've also heard a really helpful paradigm that applies to suffering and grief called the grief circle and that's effectively uh complaints can only move out of a grief circle and not into it and so the person who's actually ill or suffering sits at the middle and then the people who are closest to them or the next layer and you keep drawing concentric circles and so if if you have you know a b for a concern or your own lament that should only move outside of the circle and not into it so if you're a friend of the family you don't tell the mom that you're upset about what the father who has cancer said because it's not appropriate you tell someone further out the circle than you and grief moves out and not in in that way i think it's another way that kind of keeps a good healthy dynamic in those situations because people's emotions are raw and the closer they are to the suffering the more raw the more difficult it is for them to process their experience there's this um i heard the story from ram das ramdas was on part two by the way you can check out more of his stuff at ramdas.org thanks to them for letting us use last week's segment but he was talking about um because he spends a lot of his time or has in the past with dying people and people in tremendous suffering and the way he talks about it is so fascinating to me because he gets a point and i think you can tell this with people that that do have an ease and a comfort and warmth around people that are suffering and they're not they're not uncomfortable but they're just present with them where you can kind of move into some of the playfulness that we were talking about in episode two with other people and this is like sort of jedi level ninja stuff to me i couldn't do this but um he was talking about this one guy that had i think it was his arm amputated and he was obviously devastated and he had lost his job had depended on it and so he was like his whole life wasn't was shattered he didn't know what he was going to do and uh i don't remember the exact joke but he went he went in and he saw everybody was being really heavy rondas went into this guy it is where he was at sitting with his family and everybody was just kind of really somber and bummed and and ramdas kind of just perceived like this this needs a little levity and he he made some joke about him not being able to go bowling anymore or something like that and which for my most i'd be horrified saying something like that um but for some reason the guy could feel the sincerity of love in it where it was coming from and told ramdas later like that was the moment that really helped him start coming to terms with his with his amputated arm and was was able to start moving forward and being healed and um just being able to see it lightly and take it like yeah and again you can't like just throw that at people but i think ramdas and what ramdas often has said is all you have to offer people is yourself you know like you can't come with just these ideas you can come with the perfect plan i know the perfect plan is to show up and to do such and such and such um but when you show up what you have to offer is your essence is yourself um so the more that you are actually full of love that you are actually full of empathy and understanding and desire for goodness you can i think it starts looking different how you engage in the suffering of people sometimes you're there and you weep with them and then sometimes you dry their eyes and then sometimes you tell them a joke and smack them on the butt and say get up stop crying you know what i mean like there's there's how you engage with people um in that moment is is improvisation really it's it's jazz on some level but it's coming from who you are and that's one area i'm definitely better than i used to be at it but it is something i i want to continue to learn how to um offer myself in in its fullness in those moments you know because i'm i'm afraid of doing something that's harmful or whatever and i guess there's probably something good in that that i should be cautious but i you know also just something beautiful about the people that you can tell they come in without caution without any guards over their hearts and they're just fully there with you that's i aspire to be that i aspire to have a simulation layer that looks exactly like that [Laughter] amazing i just get jealous of like people sometimes like as much as they drive me crazy like just not psychonaut yeah software humans but like real humans [Laughter] like it must be interesting and compelling like i can feel myself doing the calculus to have a social interaction sometimes and i'm just like i wonder what it'd be like to just just to do it just to do it maybe too much romdos for me that's the problem uh i mean well i don't know that's part of what keeps it light and fun like the second you it feels like if you go all the way down that trail then you can be i mean obviously ramdas is pretty ram to us yeah but that's why i think it's like jedi skills it's it's it's advanced to be able to to feel and see at the same time you know what i mean sometimes it's you get lost in a feeling and lose seeing it from from a higher perspective and sometimes you see it from a higher perspective and and avoid being present in it and feeling it to somehow be able to do both and hold them both in tension that's uh ninja skills i got work to do [Music] so this is the conclusion of our three-part series on suffering and following this episode we're going to take a little mid-season break for the holidays and we'll see you again in january we love your reaction to this entire series you can do so by visiting the liturgist.com podcast and leaving a comment on any of the three episodes you can also join us on facebook at facebook.com liturgis and you can tweet at us at the liturgists on twitter the show is made possible by our patrons on patreon who commit to supporting the show on a monthly basis you can join them and get access to a second podcast called the liturgist conversations by going to thelidges.com and clicking the donate button in the upper right hand corner the allergist podcast is produced by greg nordin project managed by corey pig and of course i'm science monk i'm michael gunger thanks for listening [Music] everybody you