The End of Suffering Is Not the End of Pain

“We can’t stop the waves, but we can learn to surf.”
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness and teaching talks

Early in a recent podcast conversation with my teacher and friend Sharon Salzberg, I admitted something I suspect many of us are living with. The world can feel like a disaster, and yet, in the same day, I can sit with my granddaughter and watch the sunrise and feel immeasurable, almost infinite joy.

Both are true.

That tension isn’t theoretical for me. It lives in the body. It shows up in the moments when I’m not performing the role that others project onto me or holding things together for others. It shows up in the question that keeps returning, sometimes gently, sometimes not: How do we live with this? With all of this? 

In that conversation, Sharon and I explored a phrase from the Buddhist tradition that has always both attracted and unsettled me: the end of suffering. It’s a phrase that can sound, at first hearing, like a promise of escape. A kind of spiritual anesthesia that numbs so much as to risk a sort of bypassing. Implicit in this is the false promise of a way out of the mess of being human. But that’s not what Sharon has spent her life teaching, and it’s not what I’ve come to understand. That’s not the dharma

The end of suffering is not the end of pain. Pain is part of the deal; it comes with the territory. Loss, uncertainty, disappointment, aging, illness, death. None of that goes away. No amount of insight or meditation exempts us from the fundamental conditions of being alive. What changes is something more subtle and, in many ways, more demanding.

Suffering is not the pain itself. It is how we relate to the pain. It is the tightening, the resistance, the story we build around what is happening. It is the belief that this should not be happening, or that we are alone in it. When that relationship shifts, even slightly, something opens. Not the removal of difficulty, but the possibility of meeting it without being entirely overtaken.

That was the ground of our first conversation.

In a second conversation, Sharon and I were joined by our dear friend and my teacher Parker Palmer. And in that exchange, something else came into view, something that, for me, raised the stakes.

At one point, the conversation slowed. Not dramatically. No one announced it. But you could feel it. The kind of pause that happens when something true is about to be said, and everyone in the room senses it.

Parker had been listening, as he does, with that particular stillness he brings. Then he said, almost quietly:

“What we don’t transform, we transmit.”

Just a simple observation that seemed to settle into the space between us.

I remember glancing at Sharon, who gave a small nod. Not agreement so much as recognition. I felt it land in my body before I could think about it.

Because if suffering is not just what happens to us, but how we meet what happens to us, then what we do not meet does not simply disappear.

It moves.

Unexamined suffering doesn’t stay contained within the borders of our own lives. It finds expression in our reactivity, in our withdrawal, in our need to be right, in our quiet resentments, and in our inability to listen. At scale, it shows up in the ways we treat each other. On the world stage, it becomes the basis of war.

Parker has spent a lifetime exploring what he calls the divided self, the ways in which we become separated from parts of our own experience, our own truth, our own inner life, and how that inner division inevitably finds its way into the world around us. A divided self does not remain private. It creates a divided world.

When we cannot bear our own fear, we locate it in someone else. When we cannot sit with our own pain, we project it outward. When we do not acknowledge our own vulnerability, we harden against the vulnerability of others. This is not a moral failure in the simplistic sense. It is a human pattern. But it is not without consequence.

At some point in the conversation, we found ourselves circling a difficult recognition: what we refuse to feel, others are often forced to carry.

That line has stayed with me because it reframes the entire idea of the end of suffering. If the end of suffering were simply a private achievement, a kind of inner calm we attain for ourselves, then it would remain, in some sense, optional. A personal preference. A way of improving our own experience of life.

But if unexamined suffering becomes harm, then how we relate to our inner life is not just a personal matter. It is an ethical demand.

This is where Sharon’s teachings and Parker’s work meet in a way that feels both clarifying and sobering. Sharon often speaks about the simple but profound recognition, “just like me.” Just like me, this person wants to be happy. Just like me, this person has known fear and loss. Just like me, this person is trying, in their own way, to make sense of things. It’s a practice that softens the boundaries we create and interrupts the reflex to make someone else into an object, a category, an “other.”

Parker, in his own language, reminds us that no one is disposable. That the health of a community, of a democracy, of any shared human endeavor, depends on our willingness to resist the temptation to write people off. To see each other as less than human is always a failure of relationship, but it is also, often, a failure of self-relationship.

Because it is much easier to discard someone else than it is to turn toward what we have not yet been willing to face in ourselves.

And so, the question is no longer only how I suffer less. It becomes: What is my suffering doing, if I do not attend to it? How is it shaping the way I show up with others? Where is it narrowing my capacity to see clearly, to listen, to remain open? Where is it asking to be met, not so that it will disappear, but so that it will not be passed along?

This is not an argument that if we just do enough inner work, we will become incapable of causing harm. We will still make mistakes. We will still hurt each other. We will still fall short of our own intentions. But there is a difference between harm that arises in the midst of honest engagement with our lives and harm that arises from what we have systematically avoided. There is a difference between acting from awareness and acting from what remains hidden.

The end of suffering, then, is not a finish line. It is a practice. A willingness to turn toward what is here, even when it is uncomfortable. A willingness to notice the places where we tighten, where we defend, where we close. A willingness to stay. And, perhaps most importantly, a willingness to recognize that this inner work is not separate from the world we are helping to create.

Because the world we experience is shaped, in countless small ways, by how we meet our own experience, including our suffering.

This does not solve the problems we face. It does not resolve the very real suffering that exists in the world. But it does ask something of us. It asks us to consider that the end of suffering is not about escaping pain. It is about ending the ways we turn pain into something more.

And that, in its own way, is a form of responsibility.

So, I find myself returning to a different set of questions. Not as a strategy, and not as a way of getting somewhere, but as a way of remaining honest in the midst of things.

Where am I not looking?
What in me remains unmet?
And who, in my life, might be carrying the weight of that?

At this stage of my life, I am less interested in answers that resolve these questions than in the discipline of staying close to them. This, it seems to me, is part of what it means to live, and to lead, as an elder. Not to eliminate suffering, which we cannot do, but to take responsibility for how we meet it, and for what we pass on.

My hope, for myself and for all of us, is not that we become free from pain. It is that we become people who, more often than not, meet that pain with enough awareness, enough honesty, and enough care that it need not become something we hand to others.

That is not the end of suffering.

But it may be a way of bringing a little less of it into the world.