“suffer well”, lalleshwari writes.
Contemplations on Suffering
written by Segovia Amil
As connections would have it, my fascination with Shiva would lead me directly to the writings of the 14th century Kashmiri mystic and poet, a bride of Shiva, Lalleswari, also known as Lalla or Lal Ded. Her poetry was composed in Kashmiri verse, also known as vaakhs. A vaakh is a short and deeply layered poetic verse. It is concise and aphoristic, not unlike the aphorisms found in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (although they arise from different lineages, traditions and tones). Both serve as compacted vessels of wisdom, although one inspires and one instructs, they each arise from lived mystical moments and are meant to express insight and inner transformation when contemplated and experienced over time.
What I would come to appreciate about such rare and sacred vaakhs is Lalleshwari’s divine understanding of suffering, detachment and liberation. Her poetry sang of suffering not as something to be avoided or escaped, but as a passage through which the soul is refined and the ego burned. This theme of suffering as refinement appears across mystical, poetic and philosophical traditions around the world. In Christian Mysticism, it is the Dark Night of Soul. The great Sufi voice Rumi portrayed suffering as divine longing and, in this moment now, I am reminded of a line that has stained my skin for years: “As your sword comes down on my neck, I will not take my eyes from your face”. I’ve found beauty in interpreting these lines as the sword being a symbol of suffering, and the eyes focused on the nature of suffering and remaining observant of it’s gifts. In the philosophical lineages of Ancient Greece, Marcus Aurelis felt certain suffering trained our virtues. In Buddhism, the First Noble Truth acknowledges suffering as part of existence itself. In Hinduism, the Upanishads teach extensively of suffering as the fire which leads to realization of the Atman. The Tantric traditions embrace suffering as part of the divine feminine herself, as inherent to the wisdom of the tangible world.
“Suffer Well,” Lalleshwari writes… and here is the vaakh, the six powerful lines from the book ‘Looking Within’: Life Lessons from Lal Ded”, translated and edited by Shonaleeka Kaul:
“Deep suffering is calamitous
like a lightning strike
and painful like being crushed in a flour mill.
It is despair like darkness at noon.
But suffer well, for suffering will lighten
the burden that is your ego.”
I encourage you to read the lines a few times, return to it later, come back to it again in a few days. Lalleshwari’s poetry shares its secrets over time and the phrase “suffer well” carries layers of spiritual and emotional weight. In fact, “suffer well” gives us something: it gives shape and direction to the above-mentioned traditions and lineage beliefs around suffering as just “part of life”. Lalleshwari adds a layer of richness and strength as she invites even greater poetic devotion to the ancient teachings. It’s almost like she is saying: suffering is a part of life, but how we suffer matters. She reclaims our dignity, invites us to give our suffering quality, and builds gracefully upon our sense of meaning. She reminds us that how we carry our pain can shape who we become and can direct our lives forward.
The great Hindu text, The Bhagavad Gita, begins with weeping. The warrior Arjuna suffers openly and elaborately, moments before war against his family, on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. As Lalleshwari writes: he is struck by lightning, he is crushed by the flour mill. The Bhagavad Gita teaches that suffering is not meaningless and not once is Arjuna’s despair dismissed. For many pages and many lines, we are wholly throttled into Arjuna’s collapse as his best friend, Krishna, the God of Love, holds space for the warrior’s private fall. After much confusion, bargaining, weeping, disbelief, teaching and above all, an apprenticeship in the art of suffering, Arjuna arrives at the moment of spiritual clarity. He exclaims, “My delusion is destroyed. I am firm.” and this journey towards divine clarity is the work of good suffering. We are shown through the Gita that there is dignity in bearing pain consciously. Arjuna, after all, “suffers well.”
Lalleshwari understood suffering as necessary, that without suffering we could not burn through external illusions and meet ourselves deeply (inwardly). The individual who suffers becomes strong through the discipline of enduring painful experiences with insight and intelligence, finding eventually that these experiences strip away the unreal. I am reminded of the coveted mantra, Asatoma Satgamaya, a Shanti Mantra from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad which translates to “Lead me from the unreal to real” and is a prayer for clarity, perhaps even through the passage of suffering. It is a prayer to be led, as Arjuna is led by Krishna, to greater wisdom.
The challenge is radical: choosing the quality of our inevitable suffering. This does not romanticize pain and yet it also does not treat pain as meaningless. We cannot escape it, so we must find a way for it to work for the evolution of our character and most importantly, our spirit. We must know what we suffer is working for us. The poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, beautifully illustrates his own enlightenment received by such suffering in the following lines: “How dear you will be to me then, you Nights of Anguish! Why didn’t I kneel more deeply to accept you?” It is within these lines alone, we see how a soul carved and refined from despair eventually reveres suffering as the Guru, the sacred teacher. Why didn’t I kneel more deeply to accept you? perhaps even, revered as a God in the end.
“How dear you will be to me then,
you Nights of Anguish!”
In Rilke’s awakening, we see where the teachings of suffering and nonresistance meet in divine union. We see the perfection of nonresistance and can use the teachings of nonresistance as tools to assist us in shaping how we suffer.
The Chinese say that water is the most powerful element because of its nonresistance. It softens into mystery; it trusts the unfolding of life. It takes the shape of what contains it and yet floods over its normal boundaries, swelling over land. The teachings of nonresistance, like the teachings of suffering as refinement, are found across the spiritual traditions. The core teaching of Buddhism emphasizes softening our perceptions of clinging and aversion (the roots of suffering, as understood by the Buddha), mystics like St. Teresa of Avila taught nonresistance in favor of the divine, Lao Tzu wrote a masterpiece all about nonresistance, the practice of yoga asanas themselves is an embodied testimony to nonresistance, where the body itself becomes a teacher of surrender and transformation.
Chiron, the wounded healer, is one of the most powerful mythic archetypes of suffering as refinement and the art of nonresistance. Chiron is an example of bearing our pain consciously and mastering the art of suffering well. In the Greek myth, Chiron is a centaur (a being who is half-man, half-horse) who is accidentally struck by a poisoned arrow and because he was immortal, the wound he endured would never heal. He lived in eternal pain and this eternal pain became an initiation: rather than allowing this pain to take hold of him, he used it and became a master of healing, of medicine and most importantly, of transformation. The myth of Chiron teaches that our deepest wounding has the power to become both our gift and our offering. He shows us that pain, when faced with deep presence, focus and humility, becomes a path to wisdom and in this teaching, even a path to service, directing the work of our lives forward. I quote the brilliant Sufi poet, Rumi, once again:
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
The traditions have been teaching us to “suffer well” since time immemorial. This is not some new idea. The ancient teachings have all strung together the same meditations over suffering since the first being on our planet suffered. I often wonder why this feels so new, so radical then for our modern world? The big body of our culture turns away in absolute disregard for any pain at all, rendering it meaningless, unnecessary, and foolish, even. We somehow moved away from the message: our suffering has meaning, gifts, and wisdom to be shared to if you’re in pain, something is wrong and what's worse is that this new messaging has not helped us escape any of that pain, in fact it has made our pain worse and beyond our deepest imaginings.
This is one of the most important questions of our time: what changed in our understanding of suffering?
The Modern World has many things our Ancient World did not. One being the myth of control and comfort. We have traded depth for efficiency. We have swapped divine discomfort with ease and define that very ease as success. We fear the interruption of our productivity, even if that productivity is forced and hollow. We have lost our sense of ritual, and our new rituals are mere performances laced with selfish and ulterior motives. Our pain is now medicated, can be hidden and packaged and even made palatable and so, in our quest for comfort, we simultaneously cast our deepest misfortunes, we miss the initiation experienced by both Chiron and Rilke. We blind ourselves to the fiery threshold of our refinement as once seen and touched by mystics like Rumi or St. Teresa of Avila. We dilute the magic of our senses entirely to the taste of spiritual nectar, we cannot taste its honey, like the honey on the tongue of poet Lalleshwari, who speaks beauty into the world as a soul which did not grow through ease.
Rilke once said that angels cannot help but tremble before the human capacity for suffering. In the same way a mother trusts her body to push from her new life, you are designed to do this work. You were designed to experience depth and to pull meaning out of that depth. In the same way the Bhagavad Gita begins with tears, you too came into the world weeping and from it, you will leave weeping as well. We can understand this weeping as pain, or we can understand it as beauty… the beauty of a life lived in wisdom and understanding of pain’s sacred function: to see our lives and ourselves clearly, to remove our ignorance, to swell, like water, over the unreal into the real.
The path inward is the most radical and tender revolution.
The long bridge across is our divine and permanent suffering.
What we do with it shapes the depth and the beauty of our life.
May we all arrive at the moment of clarity.
May we invoke within us our own Arjuna, our own Chiron and hold near our hearts the black bow of suffering and use this poisoned arrow…
our delusions destroyed, our mind and hearts firm.
May we suffer well.
In gratitude,
Segovia Amil
Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu
5 QUESTIONS FOR CONTEMPLATION:
1. What wound in my own life has shape me most? What has it taught me that joy could not?
2. Do I resist suffering? Or am I willing to be refined by it?
3. In what ways has pain opened me to what’s sacred?
4. What would it look like if I let the wound speak?
5. What beauty would I not carry had I never experienced such suffering?
