Ripening the Fruit

In a fascinating online article entitled, "The Hidden Side of Happiness," Kathleen McGowan writes of the relationship between adversity and happiness in human experience. McGowan uses one particularly powerful anecdote to illustrate the process of suffering leading to insight and awakening:

In a dark room in Queens, New York, 31-year-old fashion designer Tracy Cyr believed she was dying. A few months before, she had stopped taking the powerful immune-suppressing drugs that kept her arthritis in check. She never anticipated what would happen: a withdrawal reaction that eventually left her in total body agony and neurological meltdown. The slightest movement—trying to swallow, for example—was excruciating. Even the pressure of her cheek on the pillow was almost unbearable.

Cyr is no wimp—diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis at the age of 2, she'd endured the symptoms and the treatments (drugs, surgery) her whole life. But this time, she was way past her limits, and nothing her doctors did seemed to help. Either the disease was going to kill her or, pretty soon, she'd have to kill herself.

As her sleepless nights wore on, though, her suicidal thoughts began to be interrupted by new feelings of gratitude. She was still in agony, but a new consciousness grew stronger each night: an awesome sense of liberation, combined with an all-encompassing feeling of sympathy and compassion. "I felt stripped of everything I'd ever identified myself with," she said six months later. "Everything I thought I'd known or believed in was useless—time, money, self-image, perceptions. Recognizing that was so freeing."

McGowan goes on to assert that such a response to extreme difficulty is far from atypical, and that one psychology professor even coined a term for this process: "post-traumatic growth." According to the article, studies have found that the lives of many who undergo major traumatic experiences become richer and more gratifying. Yet, as with other areas, it is our approach to such experiences that is critical to whether they have a positive or negative impact:

. . . actually implementing these changes, as well as fully coming to terms with the new reality, usually takes conscious effort. Being willing and able to take on this process is one of the major differences between those who grow through adversity and those who are destroyed by it.

'Abdu'l-Baha describes the effect of suffering in the following terms:

The mind and spirit of man advance when he is tried by suffering. The more the ground is ploughed the better the seed will grow, the better the harvest will be. Just as the plough furrows the earth deeply, purifying it of weeds and thistles, so suffering and tribulation free man from the petty affairs of this worldly life until he arrives at a state of complete detachment. His attitude in this world will be that of divine happiness. Man is, so to speak, unripe: the heat of the fire of suffering will mature him. Look back to the times past and you will find that the greatest men have suffered most.

On the question of why it is that suffering enables our minds and spirits to advance, part of the answer may be found in the following passage, also from 'Abdu'l-Baha:

While a man is happy he may forget his God; but when grief comes and sorrows overwhelm him, then will he remember his Father who is in Heaven, and who is able to deliver him from his humiliations.

One thing I've noticed in my personal experience is that sometimes it's a lot easier to perceive the benefits of suffering in retrospect than it is while currently experiencing it. Although I certainly must say that I find it much easier to be in a prayerful state in the midst of difficulty! As the above quotations describe, detachment from the world and mindfulness of God are some of the immediate ways in which suffering benefits us. In this light it is interesting to reconsider Cyr's transformative experience and her recognition of the relative unimportance of "time, money, self-image, [and] perceptions" in the grand scheme of things after her intense experience of suffering. Perhaps knowledge of the potential beneficial effects of difficulty is one of the ways we can take a step towards the "conscious effort" and willingness to take on the process that McGowan describes as resulting in growth.

Your thoughts?