Focusing on Your Suffering Creates Suffering

A wise teacher once said; living is suffering. Nothing could be more accurate in this life. The world is unsafe, and it always has been and will always be. No human being can promise otherwise, whether a leader or a sage. No wise sage ever would, and every political leader most definitely will. It is up to you to discern between those who would deceive for their gain and those who would teach at their peril.

Our responsibility to the suffering in the world is to commit our lives to reducing it and to be responsible for it. The paradox is that we can never accomplish this within a position focused on our own suffering. It must always be focused beyond ourselves and even beyond our immediate relationships. Our first responsibility is to learn and practice the tools needed to live in an unsafe world effectively. Our second goal is to teach those tools to those closest to us: build resilience, foster coherence, and challenge egoic identity. This is our most noble calling in life.

If our purpose is to reduce the suffering in the world, then we cannot focus on our suffering to live out that purpose. If our focus comes from a place of self-services, then we will only perpetuate the suffering in the world and amplify our own. This is where so many within the EDI, Pride, and oppression-focused communities find themselves. The paradoxical result of this focus is the amplification of oppression, not the diminishing of it. It is a simple system dynamic that linear thinking will never be able to comprehend. I have been and continue to serve these communities and all others by urging individuals to evolve their paradigms in this 21st century.

We are co-evolving creatures constructing our collective reality. If we do so with hatred, we get hatred. If we do so with a love-in-action, we produce coherent outcomes. It is a way of being that requires us to listen to the suffering of others, especially those we do not understand, see eye to eye or agree with. It also requires us to challenge our assumptions of how the world works. Such actions take courage and the ability to hold positive space for emergent outcomes. Contrary to popular belief, emergent outcomes do not result from what we plan, strive for, or work toward. Emergence is reality-manifested from the collective output of our individual being. If that being is anxious, worried, and acts out of fear, we get the world we live in today, and suffering amplifies.

The Universe is nonlinear. Living in a complex and dynamic system challenges us to become responsible for cultivating states of resilience, coherence, courage, fortitude, objectivity, and justice for all living beings. If we see others as our enemy or a threat, we can never hold such a space, and paradoxically, we are thrown into a pit of despair of our own design. This is the system dynamic of paradox at work.

The emotions of anxiety, worry, and existential dread manifest from ideas around future outcomes and potential or imagined dangers. They are not rooted in the reality of the now -the present moment in which our individual being currently resides. No one is breaking down your door nor dragging people who look like you, identify as you, or come from your community into the street. When you understand your role as a system designer, you realize your responsibility to ensure you do not manifest such ugly emergent outcomes through your fear. Release from this form of personal suffering comes from understanding where our control in this world resides – within our selves.

Root yourself in this reality: You are the only thing you have control over in this world. Everything else is just an illusion. You are responsible for your thoughts and your reactions to outside stimuli. If your response-ability is reduced to what you can imagine could happen and you hold incoherent space, then you are a slave to your own mind. If your response-ability is held closely toward cultivating a resilient, coherent, and courageous sense of being, then you are on the path to becoming your own master. We take responsibility for the emergence in the world by being accountable for the coherent space we each cultivate - within which collective emergence occurs.

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Jeremy Tunnell is an author, facilitator, and consultant with Co3 Consulting. He writes and presents on The Colonized Mind, building personal resilience, organizational coherence, and our reality in complex systems. Together with his partner, Dr. Gerry Ebalaroza-Tunnell, he leads teams and organizations in equity and inclusion through Healing the Colonized Mind and Whole Systems Leadership. Gerry is the principal consultant for Co3 Consulting and the author of the upcoming book Evolution of Aloha and the children's book Let's Live Aloha. Together, they host The Plowline Podcast. and founder of the Zoetic Institute

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