Do you believe there is value in suffering?

For many years I believed suffering was God’s punishment for wrong-doing or -being and had to be endured. After a while it occurred to me that I invented my own suffering, perhaps originally to punish myself for being *bad* (or different), for my seeming inability to fit into the mold that was set out for me to grow up in. Suffering was both penance and indulgence, in a manner of speaking. I hated it and somehow welcomed it at the same time.

It seems to me that the value in suffering is in its role as an arrow, its straight, true, honest way of pointing me in the direction where I should look if I want to understand my pain, to heal myself: You’re suffering? Look here (where you feel it). When I observe closely my own suffering, I see that it’s nudging me to move, to get off my position (literally and/or figuratively), to get unstuck. But only if I want to be whole. And in a way I have to make friends with the pain, not wallow in it, not indulge (in) it, not use it for my own ends.

You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation - and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else. (Hermann Hesse)

For me,  this question is partly about whether I believe in my own pain. When I really look at it, I’d say, no, I don’t. Even as I’m suffering it, I see it as an illusion of sorts, a means to an end maybe; I see it as self-imposed in a way, as what I said above, a pointer. I don’t necessarily see other people’s pain that way. My way is my way, their way is theirs; I can really only speak for myself.