After reading “Should This Be the Last Generation” on the New York Times philosophy blog, and then “A Crack in the Stoic’s Armor” from the same, it struck me that our society really sucks at suffering. We miss the point entirely.

The summary of our view of suffering is so short that it feels like I’m making a straw man of it, but I don’t think I am: suffering is bad, and it should be avoided. Our idea of a happy life is one without suffering, and our ideal society is one where nobody suffers. It’s hard to even think where to begin with it.

But is suffering really a bad thing? I suspect that it might not be, in a way.

Exercise hurts, doesn’t it? Especially when you’re out of shape, and you do something that you know fit people should do, like run 15km or lift something really heavy or bike up a huge hill. Not only does it hurt to do, it hurts for days after, and you can even injure yourself. This is why, when you’re starting to exercise, it’s important to learn to exercise properly. You warm up, you don’t overexert yourself, you learn the proper form. In cycling, for example, you learn to pedal from the ball of your foot, to keep your knees in line with your leg and ride a bike that fits. Not only is this more efficient, it reduces the strain on your joints and feet. If you just start cycling hard on a poorly sized bike and with bad pedaling form, you’re likely to injure yourself, and it’ll take ages to recover. Yoga is another good example: bridge pose can wreck your lower back, the plow can hurt your neck, headstands can do both, and let’s not even talk about something like Dwi Pada Sirsasana. So you learn to watch your body, and know the difference between stretching and overextending.

Of course, we all know that exercise is good for you when you do it right. At the end of all of that discomfort, you come out with more powerful muscles, better flexibility, a stronger heart, more efficient lungs, and so on.

I propose a definition: suffering is the sensation of spiritual exertion.

Most of us have had the opportunity to meet someone who has suffered a lot and come out of it with a presence. They are probably not very loud—they might not say much at all—but they somehow fill the room. You get the impression that on some level, they see right through you. It’s almost unnerving. You could say that these people have suffered well. On the other side, we probably know people who, under the weight of their suffering, have turned into brittle, neurotic shells of people. You could say that they haven’t suffered well; that they’ve injured themselves.

We can’t avoid suffering. Just like we can’t live without using our bodies, we can’t live without using our spirit. No matter what, there will always be a box to lift or a flight of stairs to climb. Likewise, there will always be heartache and disappointment. We already know that if we don’t want to experience physical discomfort in our everyday lives, we need to keep our bodies at a fitness level that can handle those boxes and stairs without undue discomfort. But we don’t seem to accept that for the spirit.

Of course, when it comes to spiritual exercise, there are a few obvious problems. Mainly, we don’t know what we’re doing, or what we’re straining, or how we can hurt ourselves. In fact, I don’t think we consciously control anything that we do, spiritually. We do seem to see a cycle, where people repeat painful patterns until they see them and understand them, and then something opens up and they move on, to get caught in something more subtle. This process of opening and increasing subtlety makes me think that spiritual exercise looks something like yoga.

When you do yoga properly, your mind is engaged in a specific way. You aren’t focused on achievement, you’re just watching. You watch your position. You watch your breathing. You watch your muscles and your joints, and where they are tight or where they strain. You go into everything fully, but only as far as you feel you can. You accept your limitations and keep going, and you open up.

And so it follows that the way to suffer is with that same watchful awareness and acceptance. You go into everything fully, but only as far as you feel you can. You accept your limitations and keep going, and you open up.

I think we’re getting the wrong idea about chakras and the subtle body. They’re outliers in the collection of eastern thought that has been vaguely incorporated into the New Age movement: most Buddhist, Hindu, and Zen philosophy is about perception and proper action, but chakra work alone seems to carry connotations of psychic awakening and what you might call “magic.” These connotations come from exactly one point, and turns out it’s a place where Western thought is unique.

In the chakra system, we have low-vibration energy that comes into your sushumna through the muladhara chakra, and its vibration is raised as it passes through you and leaves at a very high vibration through your sahasrara chakra. But where does that low-vibration energy come from?

In some theories there’s another chakra below the root chakra, the “earth star,” which is perhaps to be viewed as the earth’s crown chakra. This evokes the idea of an earth mother; that is, Gaia. This seems to be the widely accepted interpretation of the source. But while we’re borrowing from the Greeks, let’s point out that they had a division here: Ge, Gaia’s realm¹, referring to the earth, underground, agricultural fertility, and so on; and Chthon, referring to the underworld, the realm of Hades, Hecate, the furies, and all the gods that we view as creepy because they involve death.

Now, it’s not surprising that we’d overlook this distinction in the West, because it has been an exceptionally long time since Christian areas of the world believed in a unified afterlife that was below us: after Jesus, all good Christians go to the sky, and what’s left down there isn’t much fun. Not only did this destroy our culture’s conception of the underworld and our understanding of the allegorical significance of an underworld descent, it made death even worse to think about. And so we assume that the source of the energy for our chakra-cogs is the Gaia of life and fertility, which detaches the whole concept of the subtle body from death and gives a comfortable feeling of magic.

But what happens if we assume that the energy Chthonic instead of Gaian? First of all, that energy flowing up our sushumna stops being psychic power and starts looking like our life force and a host of more familiar metaphors: the thread of fate, the candle-flame of the soul, and so on. And then the idea of improving the flow of energy starts looking a bit different: less like a psychic awakening and more like having a stronger life force, a thicker thread, or a brighter flame.

Essentially, it becomes clear that the subtle body is a metaphor for the psyche.

Let’s look at an ideal activation of the chakras². First, as a child (when your root chakra is activated) you develop a “primordial trust” that “the earth is a secure place which provides you with everything you need.” As puberty comes along, the sacrum is activated, and you “open yourself towards others, especially people of the opposite sex, and behave naturally.” Your creativity is awakened. As you grow to maturity (solar plexus activation) you develop “a feeling of peace and inner harmony with… life in general, and your place in life in particular,” you find your calling. With this solid foundation of safety and belonging, you are able to view others with compassion and acceptance—the activation of your heart chakra—and then (apparently in your 30s) learn to express yourself without fear with the activation of the throat chakra. Through this open and honest communication you gain the wisdom that comes along with the activation of the third eye, and finally, generally somewhere around 50, you get your crown chakra activation and gain a deep understanding of what this whole ride has been about.

This is the story of an ideal life without unaddressed psychological trauma, and the activation of each chakra corresponds to a new stage in our personal development. The work done to clear blockages becomes a form of therapy. For example, Kundalini dance turns into a form of movement therapy, with music chosen to bring up blockages from a specific chakra, and then dance to work through it. It even throws Tantra into a theraputic light of sorts.

This interpretation puts the chakra system approximately in line with a lot of other things: if chakra blockages are called attachments and patterns, it lines up with ideas from Zen, Buddhism and Hinduism about acting without attachment and seeing through illusion. It also fits nicely with psychotherapy.

I love it when things come together.

1. In fact: Gaia comes from Ge (earth) and Aia (grandmother).
2. The quotations and approximate activation ages in this paragraph are taken from The Chakra Workbook by Shalila Sharamon and Bodo J. Baginsky.