Suffering Does Not Build Character
I’m sitting outside on the most heavenly almost-spring desert day writing this. Earlier, my body cheerfully informed me: we will do our doings mostly outside today. We sure will.
Bees are loudly buzzing away at the blooms on the sensuously fragrant rosemary bushes. All manner of birds are singing and chirping in such riotous, unified cacophony, Oli just asked “what’s up with these birds today?”
“They’re ecstatic with delight at this weather,” I say, “just like us.”
Yesterday was high, wild desert winds, and tomorrow (the day you're receiving this,) more of the same. Likely later on today also. This is usually the case when the seasons are turning out here. But in the spaces between the winds, these perfect moments of budding spring: palpable abundance.
I’ve been sitting here letting myself savor it. Letting my body feel it, my skin absorb it and receive it all. Letting myself attune, settle into and bask in all that’s here right now - my heart and belly are singing loudly, along with the birds. It’s obviously a delight to do that when it’s like this. Less so when the winds are raging and rattling through bone and skin.
Something I’ve learned from allowing myself to feel and anchor into the medicine of joy and delight is that it creates capacity for those more trying times. It creates the space to actually turn towards the parts of me and of life that require attention and tending - not to ‘fix’ them but rather to offer them the space to release, evolve and transform in their own time.
This is the essence of trauma integration through creating capacity for joy, pleasure, delight. Easy enough, you might think - but traumatized, hypervigilant nervous systems don’t feel safe to allow in the felt-sense spaciousness of joy. It’s a gradual process.
Allowing joy to be the elixir of integration and healing also feels terribly unsafe for those of us who have been force-fed the unbeautiful belief that ‘suffering and struggling build character’.
(We see you, patriarchal puritanism.)
I would offer that suffering and struggling do not in fact build character.
It’s true of course that life contains myriad shades of suffering (the wind started to pick up as I wrote that - oh hi, wild desert, who never misses a beat.)
But unlike what the proponents of self-flagellation/original sin would have us believe, suffering doesn’t build character. It degrades it and makes it rigid.
If we define ‘character’ as the ability and willingness to be more engaged with life and all its many faces, then capacity is what gifts us this ability. Capacity in the body and nervous system to turn towards what’s here now - whether it be the unbearable lightness or heaviness of being.
And as noted earlier - the sensational experiences of joy, pleasure, delight are what physiologically create this space and capacity. However, this doesn’t mean that we run towards oppressive toxic positivity that wants to bypass and negate anything that’s heavy or “negative”.
No. Rather, it’s cultivating the habit of attuning to something that feels joyful in our life, our environment - whatever small or big thing - and anchoring ourselves there, resourcing ourselves from there, feeling the spaciousness of that in the body. If we can allow our character to emerge from there, we can become more and more willing to turn towards whatever constrictions and tensions are present in our lives and bodies, and offer them that space to be felt and seen, the freedom to transform.
This creates the sanctity of being in relationship with all of ourselves, with our bodies, our lives, our environment - and with each other. In contrast, the belief that suffering is what builds character creates alienation from life, martyrdom (a very slippery ego slope), and absolutely no capacity to be in genuine relationship with anything or anyone, least of all ourselves.
II.
One of the most harmful ways that we’ve been trained to beat ourselves with the stick of ‘suffering builds character’ is through our collective (non) relationship with money. It’s something that has been handed down from generation to generation - through no fault of our ancestors - to the point that it’s not even recognized as being deeply unnatural.
We’ve been colonized into believing that ‘making money’ means suffering, struggling and exploiting our own and each other’s energies. Not only does this create deep wells of resentment in our systems and energy fields, it imprints resentment, fear and loathing in our dealings with money too.
There’s no space, no capacity to be in relationship here.
(Many of us who have refused to engage with money beyond something deeply distasteful and vulgar have sensed this unnatural and unsustainable state of things - but have confused the energy of money with the artificial systems that have been constructed around it.)
This is the bedrock of transactional capitalism.
And it doesn’t have to be this way.
We are at a place where the evolutionary choice-point to shift towards relational capitalism is available to us. This visions a reality based on the Indigenous value of being in right relationship with all life, all phenomena - including the spirit and energy of money, commerce and exchange.
And we can’t be in right relationship with something that we feel resentment towards, that we don’t feel safe around - that we equate with the idea of suffering and struggling for in order to prove our worth and build our character.
Money wants to say to us:
Your worth is unconditional and inherent - no number can ever express or come close to it.
Your character emerges from a flexible, embodied capacity for life.
I want to create a world with you where I’m not the cause of your suffering and struggle but a loving playmate who cheers you on and supports you as you riotously sing your soul’s wild songs to the world.
I want to be reunited with Nature as the beneficent energy of exchange and potential that I am.
Are you ready to turn towards me, cultivate right relationship with me, and let me flow towards you so that I can be liberated from unnatural systems that use me for war, genocide and debt?
What does it feel like in the body when you let yourself attune to these messages from money, rather than the suffering-infused ones from our dominant (and dying) culture? Does it feel dangerous? Ludicrous? Exciting? Full of joyful possibility and potential?
Money needs the sensitive, spiritual, creative ones, the artists, mystics, visionaries and change-makers to start building the wealth of capacity within to sustainably create and steward wealth in our own lives and in the world.
The Earth is asking us to do this too.
We begin by unhooking the money systems built on suffering that have infiltrated our own nervous systems and bodies. We engage in this with curiosity, openness and playfulness - so we have the capacity to witness what’s ready to dissolve and evolve.
And we don’t have to do this alone.
The first monthly session of Money + Me is on Saturday, March 9th where we’ll embark on this radical journey together.
The exchange is $44.
Find out more here