Freshta

A Direct Experience With Suffering and Healing Several years ago, my house caught fire and both of my arms up to the elbows were severely burned. The doctors told me it was second-degree burns: the hair follicles were completely destroyed, the skin looked melted and flattened, almost as if it had been scorched beyond recovery.The medical advice I received was to constantly massage and move my hands—at least ten times a day—so that scar tissue wouldn’t freeze my fingers in place. When I returned home, I went far beyond what they prescribed. I massaged and moved my hands obsessively, sometimes dozens of times a day, shaping and reshaping them into form. Slowly, the hands began to regenerate. Not only did they heal functionally, but even the details—the hair follicles, the wrinkles, the texture returned almost as if nothing had ever happened. Today, no one who looks at my hands would guess they were once burned so severely. What struck me most, however, was not the physical recovery but the experience of suffering itself. My husband, sitting beside me, seemed to feel the pain as if it were his own. Yet for me, the pain was strangely absent. I did not suffer the way one might expect. At that time, I didn’t yet recognize myself as God, nor had I fully realized the nature of consciousness. I had left Islam behind and no longer identified with Allah, but I hadn’t yet discovered the truth of what I am. And still, without knowing it, I directly experienced that suffering is not ultimately real. The fire, the burns, the medical prognosis—all of it was real in a relative sense. But the “suffering” was nowhere to be found except in the mind. What I discovered is that the mind fabricates suffering, and when one ceases to buy into it, even the most extreme circumstances can unfold without pain in the way we normally imagine. This experience left me with a radical understanding: suffering is optional. Pain may arise, but the identification with suffering is created entirely in thought. Reality itself does not suffer.