Loss – Suffering

Warriors Get Used to Loss – Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. In other words, it is the position that pain holds in your life that causes suffering.

Pain is Joy’s Shadow – Joy is an excess of feeling and so is suffering. When we long to “numb out”, we numb everything. If we live our lives in fear, we avoid the potential excitement of holding breath on the edge of discovery.

Warriors allow themselves to feel it all. We take on the feelings of the entire planet to show we can’t be destroyed by them. Warriors explore and expand the edges of perception and assessment. Philosophical coping mechanisms can be Buddhist – “It’s all illusion” “Practice taming the wild mind” or religious – “Suffering brings us closer to God in developing compassion for all creation” and “Birth pangs are necessary to bring new life.” Any way we can keep our mind and soul responsive and deepening benefits the whole planet.

Don’t Surrender to Learned Helplessness – Too much suffering breeds inertia. We stop even trying to better our human situation while attracting predators to such easy prey. Even worse, we become predators ourselves, bragging to the godless that we are the new potentates. Cruelty breeds endless cruelty. There must be a way to step off this treadmill – there’s enough suffering going around without manufacturing more.

Warrior Daring Frees the Universe – Imagination itself comes from discomfort, even misery. We see a need to expand our mental repertoire, to magically increase the very dimensions of thought that seem to imprison us. As a species we have broken through this many times. There are always further epiphanies awaiting

Models – “You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered” – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard” – A.A. Milne

“Only people who are capable of loving strongly can suffer such deep sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heal them” – Leo Tolstoy

“What we once loved we can never lose for it becomes a part of us”

– Helen Keller

#Haiku: Profit/Loss Analysis

Does autumn lose summer
Warmth or
Gain snowblanket?
Peonies decide.