Learning in a Suffering-Riddled World
Stop for a moment. Look at the picture above and pause for 3-5 seconds … What comes to mind?
Perhaps, as a parent, you feel a flicker of anxiety about what could happen to your child. Perhaps you remember being young and afraid to go down the fireman’s pole. Or maybe a wave of nostalgia arises — a playground you once loved.
Whatever surfaced — thoughts, sensations, images, emotion — pausing for a moment and considering this image demonstrates something: you are a learner. From birth, you have moved through life’s experiences, made meaning from them, and they have become part of you — mind, body, and heart.
Your learning and mine happens in a suffering-riddled world. We breathe it in, and we breathe it out. Just as wine takes on the characteristics of its soil so too people take on the characteristics of their felt experiences.
Along the way, we meet disappointment, loss, unpredictability, criticism, betrayal. In response, we adapt — by bracing, avoiding, over-functioning, shutting down, staying on guard, or trying harder. Over time, these adaptations become patterns. And those patterns become how we live.
As life continues, new sufferings meet old wounds and soon enough our world inside is crowded and intolerable. Maybe your anxiety refuses to remain as background noise. Maybe you experience outbursts of anger. Maybe you are simply exhausted from carrying the load. When the pain grows loud enough, it often motivates us towards change. Perhaps, that is the very reason you are reading this blog post.
Enter Counseling
In moments like these, insight alone is not enough to cause deep change. You need new experiences — experiences that allow new learning to take root. In computer terminology, you need new code to overwrite old code.
How does this happen?
The counselor, or co-traveler, accompanies you. Together you identify the “forward” you seek to find. The counselor then joins you where you are and attends to what arises as the two of you move in that direction. Attuning and attending to reactions, emotions, and patterns in real time, the counselor provides what you need — interventions — in order to help you stay present and respond differently, thus producing new learning experiences and re-writing the code. Overtime, those experiences in counseling reshape old patterns. And new patterns become how you live.
This process is iterative and unfolds incrementally, step by step, conversation by conversation. And slowly, you move you towards the “forward” you desire.
With these conditions, your pain becomes the soil for your growth, and you emerge from the process with new learnings ready to step into the world differently.
Counseling is a relational laboratory of experiential learning for the re-learning, or re-formation, of the whole person — mind, body, and heart.
Your Part
As co-travelers, you too play a critical role.
To learn requires humility — the willingness to say, “I need something outside of myself.” It is a readiness towards wisdom-seeking curiosity.
To learn is a “hope experiment”— the quiet decision to risk believing that something better might come from this work.
To learn requires patience — it unfolds incrementally, step by step, conversation by conversation. Patience with yourself, your co-traveler, and the process of change are vital.
So where are you — Do you wish to continue carrying your suffering alone or are you ready to step into it and towards your own formation?
If something in you knows it is time — listen to that voice. And let’s begin.
— Clarke