I’m going to let you in on a little secret: No matter how much you self-improve, and no matter how many boxes you check that you think you need to check to have the perfect life, you will never escape suffering.

Ironically, oftentimes it’s the striving towards something better that brings you more pain than if you just sat on your butt and did nothing. Sure, you can avoid the pain of self-improvement but sitting around and doing nothing, but that means you have to embrace the pain of knowing you didn’t do anything meaningful with your life.

What’s even more ironic is that your avoidance to suffering creates more suffering. Avoiding the suffering of working out and changing your diet guarantees the suffering involved with poor health in the future. Avoiding having that tough conversation with a loved one creates more suffering because you allow problems and emotions to fester like a disease.

I’m sure you can find examples from your own life where you can see how avoidance of suffering is only causing more pain. Well, if life is suffering and we can’t avoid it, then is there any hope?

I believe the answer is yes, but you’re just not going to like it because …. (big surprise) it involves suffering. In the first article I wrote called Be the Buffalo, we saw that what the buffalo does when it encounters the unavoidable suffering of enduring a storm is that it runs towards the storm instead of away from it.

The buffalo doesn’t prolong its suffering by trying to avoid the storm like the cows who turn tail and run in the opposite direction only to have the storm catch up and then consume them completely.

See, the problem with running away from the storm is that once it catches up, and you’re still running in the same direction, then you’re just following the storm at that point. You’re literally putting yourself in the problem and not because you want to solve it, but because you’re a fool.

You’ll stay in the heart of the worst of the storm until it’s finally over or until you’re so exhausted and defeated that you fall down and eventually, the storm mercifully rolls away from you, but by then you’ve been in the storm for so long that you’re miserable, hurt or even dead. That’s the life of a cow, the animal that avoids and flees at the first sign of trouble.

The buffalo runs towards the storm. It confronts the problem head on, and by embracing the suffering, it makes the whole ordeal last less time.

Imagine the concept as if you are a wide-receiver, and the football is suffering. You run out on the field and catch the pass, and now you’re holding the football, you’re holding onto suffering. Now, as soon as you get the ball, what happens? The other team, which can represent obstacles as challenges, are going to try and tackle you. Ooops.

The defenders rush you and now you have two options: run towards the end-zone or run away from the people trying to tackle you by going backwards. The point of the game is to score that touchdown, right? Well, then you have to run towards the people who want to take you down.

Its the same with life. You have to carry that suffering and still make it to the end and win. The problem with most people is that whenever they catch the ball, they start running the other way when the defenders come at them because they’re scared, and they lose yards on every play.

If you keep losing yards because you’re running the wrong way because you’re afraid to get tackled, then understand that you’re not going to win, and you’re still probably going to get tackled anyways. That sucks.

Or you can be a bad-ass and catch the ball and break tackles and run deep into enemy territory towards the end zone as fast as you can and then you score that touchdown and win the game. That’s buffalo mentality.

Sure, it sucks to get tackled and to get hit, but you’re still going to get pancaked when you’re avoiding running the ball down the field. The only difference is that when you’re a coward you get hit more times and you just get embarrassed because you’re too afraid to win. You don’t know any football teams named the ‘Cows’, do you? That’s because cows don’t score touchdowns.

Alan Watts talked about something called the Backwards Law, or the Law of Reversed Effort which is a law that states that when we struggle for something (finding happiness by avoiding suffering), the more likely we are to not receive it, but that when we finally stop resisting and struggling and we accept what is (embracing the suffering), then we often get the desired results (problem goes away and you can be happy).

See, the cow struggles to avoid the storm, and by running away, it just ends up enduring the storm longer. The buffalo accepts the storm and runs towards it and only has to endure it for a short time. The buffalo isn’t resisting; it is embracing suffering to maximize its comfort in the paradoxical way of the backwards law.

You see, what you want is always on the other side of suffering, and when you embrace the suffering, it arrives quicker.

Everything positive and worthwhile is created by working through a negative experience, never by avoidance of suffering. The more you desperately strive for happiness by avoiding anything painful, the more happiness avoids you. The moment you embrace the suffering and work through it, happiness just seems to come to your life.

Avoiding pain brings more pain. Denying failure is to fail. Avoiding responsibility is what brings you stress and anxiety. Avoidance only drags out the negative experience. Embracing the pain and negativity, although acute in the moment, gets the negative over with so much quicker. Running towards the problem is how we resolve issues efficiently.

The only way to overcome suffering is to bear it. This is the backwards law in action. To bear suffering with honor and strength takes practice, and the way to practice is to run towards what you fear, towards what brings you pain.

Now, an important thing to take away from this is to also choose meaningful suffering to embrace. Suffering is a part of life no matter what you do, so you might as well choose to suffer for something worth suffering for.

The good kind of suffering teaches us something and it has something meaningful and fulfilling on the other side.

Everything sucks. All good comes with a bad, and all bad comes with a good. This is the Principle of Polarity at play. Your job is to decide on what is meaningful enough to suffer for, and then to embrace that suffering with honor.

The backwards law is using the Principle of Polarity and the Principle of Rhythm to your advantage because when you polarize yourself to the extreme of negativity in whatever situation (embracing the suffering), then the back-swing of Rhythm brings us back to something positive (what you gain by going through suffering).

If you can find what you enjoy suffering for, then you will know what kind of person you are. You’re never going to get away with not suffering, but by investing your time and energy into the things that you are willing to suffer for, or into the things you can even enjoy suffering for, then you can maximize your enjoyment of life.

For example, I have the desire to be healthy and strong. The problem with being healthy and strong is that exercise involves suffering. You have to endure difficult workouts, you have to stop eating junk food, and you have to sacrifice the time you could’ve dedicated to entertainment.

However, I would prefer that suffering to the suffering involved with feeling like crap, or with feeling weak or having to deal with being insecure about my body all the time. And ironically, now that I’ve been doing it for so long, I enjoy the suffering involved with working out, and my body feels and looks better than it ever has in my life. If I’m going to be a buffalo, then I might as well be a strong buffalo.

A lot of people are tumbleweeds. They have no direction and so they are forced to suffer through a lot of unnecessary suffering that they probably wouldn’t have chosen for themselves. They suffer for things that bring no satisfaction and no fulfillment and all that suffering is meaningless because they haven’t decided on what is meaningful to them.

If you don’t decide on what you are willing to suffer for, then either someone else is going to decide for you or you’re going to have a life with a lot of random meaningless suffering. Have some purpose for your life and your suffering. That’s the whole basis of Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy. Finding a meaning for your suffering is what makes it bearable.

Have a direction. What is meaningful enough to suffer for? Decide on what you want and then embrace the suffering that comes with it. Use the backwards law to solve the problems that you’ve been avoiding. Be a buffalo and embrace the suffering because you know there is something better on the other side.

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