Virtually all of us exist in a state of chronic, low-grade suffering or, as Thoreau put it, we while away our days in “quiet desperation.” It is the first and perhaps most important of the Buddha’s four noble truths, this idea of life as suffering.

Yet most who read these words will say something to the effect of, “Mmm, not me. My life is going just fine, thank you very much.” They will point to a healthy bank account, vacation plans, a growing family, even the delicious dinner from the night before as evidence that suffering may exist from time to time, but it is an aberration akin to the occasional thunderstorm.

Suffering, in fact, is your true Self’s whispered urgings to awaken. As Joel Goldsmith would remind his students, your spirit will only wait so long before it clobbers you with a 2 x 4. You may think your life is about amassing material wealth, raising kids, saving the whales, but your spirit knows different and if it can’t get your attention the subtle way, it will use more dramatic measures.

In other words, go ahead and ignore the nagging misgivings within, tamp down the anxieties and fears, pretend that the “security” of a career or marriage is enough. At some point that subtle form of suffering will be replaced by its more acute cousin, the one that brings you to your knees when your mate at last walks out on you, when a lump is discovered in the breast, when the market crashes and takes your money with it.

And therein lies the irony. Suffering doesn’t make life difficult, our collective denial of it does. Your ego has constructed an elaborate picture of “your life” and that delusion is predicated on you playing along; on you ignoring those same whispered urgings of your spirit. The problem is, you’ve bought into this picture and haven’t noticed that the very things that bring you happiness also bring you unhappiness.

We “fall in love” with a mate and then he breaks our heart and we “hate” him; we are “blessed with children” and then we worry ourselves sick about them; we land a terrific new job and in short order we’re praying for the weekend. We are rats on a wheel, the cheese always just beyond our reach. If we’d just step off the wheel for a moment we might notice that the whole game is rigged; that we’re never going to get the cheese on that damned wheel.

Which is why true suffering is such a gift. For a brief time we are in fact knocked from the wheel and the ego’s version of the world is brought into stark focus. If my beloved husband can cheat on me; if this cancer might kill me; if everything I ever worked for can disappear overnight, maybe I need to take a harder look at myself, at this thing called life.

As George Eliot so elegantly put it:  “Deep unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.” The question is whether you put suffering to work in the quest for the real you, or ignore it – and its lessons – to perpetuate the ego’s illusion of you?