Necessary and Unnecessary Suffering

Suffering is part of being human.
No life unfolds without loss, limitation, or pain.

Yet not all suffering is the same.

Some suffering belongs to the conditions of existence itself: illness, aging, grief, separation, uncertainty, vulnerability.
This kind of suffering cannot be eliminated.
It is woven into the fabric of life.

Other suffering arises from how we meet those conditions: resistance, avoidance, fear, shame, or inherited patterns of defense.
This suffering is not inevitable.
It grows from the ways we struggle against reality rather than inhabit it.

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “No mud, no lotus.”
He was pointing to a simple but profound truth: suffering itself is not the obstacle to awakening; it is often the ground from which it grows.

Necessary suffering is what life asks of us simply because we are alive.
It includes loss, change, disappointment, and the limits of control.
It is the pain of loving in a world where nothing remains fixed.

Unnecessary suffering is what we add:
the refusal to feel,
the insistence that life be other than it is,
the stories that magnify shame or fear,
the defenses that isolate us from connection.

Much of human healing involves learning to differentiate these two.

When necessary suffering is resisted, it often becomes unnecessary suffering.
Grief resisted becomes bitterness.
Fear resisted becomes anxiety.
Loss resisted becomes despair.

Yet when necessary suffering is met with presence, something different unfolds.
It can soften identity, open compassion, and deepen contact with life.

Richard Rohr writes that “pain that is not transformed is transmitted.”
When suffering is avoided or denied, it tends to reappear through patterns, relationships, or inner conflict.
When it is faced and integrated, it can become wisdom.

This does not romanticize pain.
It recognizes that suffering honestly met can transform rather than only wound.

Transformation does not eliminate suffering.
It changes our relationship to it.

As unnecessary suffering loosens, necessary suffering becomes more bearable and often more meaningful.
We discover that pain and love are intertwined: to care is to risk loss, to live is to change.

From a contemplative viewpoint, the path is not toward a painless life.
It is toward a truthful one.

A life in which suffering is neither denied nor multiplied,
but met with awareness, compassion, and participation.

Returning to Christ After Many Paths

A contemplative journey through traditions toward the Living Christ

There are many ways people arrive at faith.
Some are formed in it from childhood.
Some discover it through study or tradition.
Some inherit it quietly and never leave.

My path has been more circular.

I was born in Paris, France and baptized Catholic.
In my family, Catholicism was present more as cultural inheritance than lived relationship.
My grandparents, especially my grandmother, carried a faith shaped more by duty and guilt than by interior freedom.
I moved through the usual stages of Catholic initiation, yet I did not feel connection through religion itself.
The teachings did not reach me.
The adults around me did not seem to carry an experience they could articulate or transmit.

And still, something was there.

As a child, I sometimes felt a profound movement in certain places:
inside cathedrals, in quiet nature, standing before a cross.
There was a depth I could not name, but it felt real and alive.
No one explained it.
No one seemed to recognize it.
It remained wordless, yet formative.

Later, my mother began exploring Buddhism while living through her own suffering.
Through her, I encountered Buddhist thought, and as I grew older, I studied Taoism and energetic traditions: meridians, Chinese medicine, chakras.
These worlds opened my perception.
They revealed dimensions of presence, awareness, compassion, and interconnectedness that resonated deeply.

During this period, I also moved away from Christianity into a form of atheism.
After my early experience of Catholicism without living spiritual transmission, disbelief felt more honest than inherited belief.
It created space for questioning and for exploring other traditions without constraint.
Yet even in atheism, the deeper sense of mystery and longing did not disappear.
It remained quietly present beneath experience.

Over time, I studied and practiced across multiple traditions and healing frameworks.
Again and again, I noticed that although the languages differed, they seemed to open toward a shared center.
The doors were different, yet something essential felt common: a movement toward truth, integration, and love.

It was only after many years of crossing these paths that I found myself returning toward what Father Richard Rohr calls the Universal Christ, the living presence of divine love permeating all creation and fully revealed in Jesus.

This return did not begin with belief.
It began with recognition.

When I read or listened to the words attributed to Jesus, I encountered a quality that felt profoundly aligned with what I had glimpsed across traditions:
compassion without exclusion, authority grounded in love rather than power, presence with suffering, and a radical orientation toward the heart of human life.

I also began to read the Bible differently.
I approached it with historical awareness, curiosity, and reverence for its human and collective authorship across centuries.
Rather than a fixed doctrinal text, I experienced it as a sacred field of inquiry into the human condition, consciousness, and relationship with the divine.

Doubt, too, has always remained part of my experience.
Faith, for me, has never been certainty.
There have been periods of questioning, distance, and unknowing.
Yet these movements did not dissolve faith; they refined it.
Doubt repeatedly stripped away inherited forms that no longer held life, allowing a deeper trust to emerge that did not depend on fixed belief.

In that way, my return to Christ did not negate the paths that shaped me.
It gathered them.

Today, I describe my orientation as rooted in contemplative Christianity and interspiritual integration.
This means that Christ has become, in my experience, the clearest personal expression of the love and presence toward which many traditions point, while I continue to honor the wisdom encountered across them.

I also recognize that my Catholic roots remain part of me.
There is a kind of spiritual memory that lives in the body: certain rituals, chants, liturgical gestures, and sacred spaces still evoke something immediate and familiar.
I was born within a particular tradition, and some of its language and symbolism continue to resonate at a deep level.

Yet I do not experience Catholicism, or any tradition, as the exclusive or final way.
The path that feels most true to me is what I call the Living Path: an ongoing encounter with the embodied, living Christ within the unfolding of human experience.

For me, this encounter is not separate from psychological depth, shadow work, or the mystery of transformation.
It includes descent as well as illumination, struggle as well as grace.
It is shaped by what I understand as engaged contemplation: a spirituality lived within life, relationship, and inner work rather than apart from them.

In this sense, my roots remain, but they have widened.
Tradition becomes ground rather than boundary.
And Christ is encountered not only in inherited forms, but in the living movement of healing, integration, and love.

My path continues.
I still learn, question, and integrate.
But I now recognize the axis that was present from the beginning:
that quiet movement I felt as a child in cathedrals, in nature, before the cross.

Sometimes faith does not begin in belonging.
Sometimes it emerges through searching.

And sometimes, after many paths, one recognizes the same living center that was always there.

Healing Beyond Religion and Therapy

Many people come to healing through one of two main doors: religion or therapy.

Religion often offers meaning, belonging, and moral orientation. Therapy often offers understanding, emotional repair, and psychological integration.

Both have helped countless people.
Both can be profoundly supportive.
And yet, many also discover that neither alone fully resolves the deeper layers of human suffering or longing.

Part of the difficulty lies in how religion and therapy have often developed in separation from embodied spirituality.

Organized religion, especially in its institutional and dogmatic forms, can provide structure, ritual, and devotion.
At its best, it transmits wisdom, community, and orientation toward the sacred.
Yet it can also become shaped by organizational dynamics, collective shadow, and human interpretation of the divine from particular historical and cultural viewpoints.
In this way, the living mystery of God may sometimes be filtered through institutional needs, authority structures, or inherited theology rather than direct encounter.

For some, disillusionment with religion leads toward atheism or secular frameworks. These can offer intellectual clarity, freedom from dogma, and relief from religious fear or guilt. They may restore autonomy and psychological honesty after experiences of spiritual constraint. Yet when disbelief becomes the only lens, it can also close access to existential depth, sacred meaning, or the dimension of mystery that many humans continue to experience.

Others live not in belief or disbelief, but in doubt.
Doubt can arise when inherited faith loses credibility yet no alternative meaning has taken root.
It can feel like uncertainty, suspension, or distance from both religion and spirituality.
Yet doubt is not merely absence. It is often a transitional space in which deeper questions and more authentic seeking begin.

I myself moved through both atheism and doubt after my early experience of Catholicism. They allowed distance from inherited belief and space for questioning. They also revealed that the deeper longing for meaning, connection, and transcendence remained present beneath experience.

Therapy, grounded in psychological science, can offer insight, relational repair, and integration of personal history. But it may stop short of existential depth, sacred meaning, or lived encounter with transcendence.

Between religion, disbelief, doubt, and therapy, something essential has often been lost: direct, embodied spirituality — lived experience of presence, connection, and meaning within the body and within life itself.

I have lived and worked across all these worlds: religion, atheism, doubt, psychology, and embodied healing traditions.
What I have observed, in myself and in others, is that deep healing often requires a dimension that none of these frameworks fully contain on their own: integration of body, psyche, and spirit in lived experience.

This is not a rejection of religion, therapy, disbelief, or questioning. It is an acknowledgment that human transformation is wider than any single worldview.

In my own life, psychological work brought essential understanding. Exploring trauma, family patterns, emotional wounds, and unconscious dynamics offered language for suffering and pathways for change.

Yet insight alone did not fully resolve the deeper sense of separation or longing that lived beneath experience.

Later, contemplative and embodied spiritual traditions opened another dimension: presence, surrender, awareness beyond identity. These practices revealed a field of being not defined by narrative self.

And still, spiritual practice alone did not always reach embodied memory, relational imprint, or nervous system history.

It became clear that healing is not achieved by choosing between belief or disbelief, certainty or doubt, psyche or spirit, religion or therapy. It unfolds through their integration.

We are not only minds shaped by story.
We are not only believers or non-believers.
We are not only certain or uncertain.
We are embodied beings whose nervous systems, relationships, histories, and spiritual orientation are inseparable.

The Living Path grows from this recognition.

It understands healing as multi-dimensional: psychological, relational, embodied, and spiritual.
It does not reduce suffering to pathology.
It does not reduce awakening to belief.
It asks instead: what restores alignment across the whole person?

Sometimes healing involves trauma work or emotional integration.
Sometimes it involves reconciling spiritual injury or inherited religious fear.
Sometimes it means returning to the body as a place of safety and presence.
Sometimes it involves rediscovering the sacred in new language or experience.

Healing is rarely linear.
It unfolds in cycles, layers, and relationships.

One of the most important movements I witness is the shift from self-repair to integration.
Self-repair assumes something is broken and must be fixed. Integration recognizes that wounded, defended, and awakened aspects of the self can gradually come into relationship.

This movement reduces shame and increases compassion. It allows healing without perfection pressure.

Different traditions describe this integration in different language.

In contemplative Christianity, it appears as incarnation: the divine encountered within human life.
In psychology, it appears as wholeness: integration of previously split aspects of self.
In embodied practice, it appears as regulation and presence within the body.

Different languages, same movement.

Healing beyond religion, dogma, therapy, disbelief, and doubt does not abandon any of them.
It simply refuses to limit human transformation to one domain.

For some, this integrated path may feel unfamiliar.
For others, it brings relief: permission to heal across dimensions without choosing sides.

The Living Path is not a method or system.
It is a space where religion, psychology, embodied spirituality, disbelief, and doubt can meet in lived experience.

The Body as a Doorway to God

In many spiritual traditions, the body has been treated with suspicion.
It has been seen as temptation, distraction, or limitation.

Yet in lived experience, the body is often where healing begins.

As an acupuncturist and integrative practitioner, I have witnessed thousands of moments in which physical sensation, breath, and embodied awareness opened access to emotional and spiritual change.

The body carries memory.
It carries trauma.
It also carries intelligence.

When people return to the body with safety and attention, something shifts.
Defended emotions soften.
Frozen experiences begin to move.
Presence becomes tangible.

This is not merely physiological.
It is existential.

We live in bodies.
If spirituality bypasses embodiment, it risks becoming abstraction.
If healing ignores the body, it risks remaining conceptual.

In contemplative Christianity, incarnation affirms that the sacred is encountered within embodied life.
God is not distant from flesh.
The divine enters human experience fully.

This theological vision resonates deeply with embodied healing traditions: that the path to wholeness passes through the body, not around it.

When someone learns to feel safely again, to breathe more freely, to inhabit sensation without fear, they often rediscover connection to life itself.
This connection can be experienced as presence, ground, or God.

Language differs.
Experience is similar.

The Living Path honors the body as part of spiritual life.
It does not separate contemplation from embodiment.

Contemplation is not withdrawal from the senses.
It is attentive presence within them.

When the body is excluded from spirituality, people may dissociate from lived experience.
When the body is included, spirituality becomes incarnate: lived in breath, movement, relationship, and sensation.

For many people today, returning to the body is the first step toward returning to the sacred.
Not through doctrine, but through direct experience of being alive and held within life.

The body is not an obstacle to God.
It is one of the places God is encountered.