iThrive Wellness Summit 2020

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iThrive

K'dee Elsen Crews

Alive, Survive, Strive and Thrive: The Journey of Suffering

Our presentation is entitled Alive, Survive, Strive, and Thrive, the Journey of Suffering.

You can turn on the news or perhaps take a look outside your own window and you'll see how we are suffering as a church, as a nation, as a world.

We see with the COVID-19 pandemic, we see racism, civil unrest, and the long list continues.

Or perhaps you may say, I don't have to look very far.

I can look within my own home or even within myself, my own heart and see that I myself am struggling, whether physically with a chronic illness or mentally with depression, anxiety, financially, socially, spiritually.

So the question is, how do I cope with this suffering?

Do we just try to stay alive or survive, get through life?

Or what if we could strive and even thrive?

Is it even possible to thrive on a journey of suffering?

We will be discussing some skills of how to cope with suffering and most importantly unravel the key to thriving.

Katie Elson, and it is a joy to share this because again, it is so relevant to what we're going through, again, as collectively as individuals, as well as individually in our own lives.

And so I'm just gonna quickly talk about the shared experience of pain.

We see that collectively we're suffering at a global and societal level.

We see protests, riots, looting, racism, the quarantine and the isolation and all the effects that that has brought about.

Even the physical health aspect of the pandemic.

We see on the family level, divorce, domestic violence, which the rates have gone up dramatically with this coronavirus.

Broken families, and these are just to name a few.

At the church level as well, even within the church, we see broken churches or disconnect from the community.

Individually, we see individuals struggling with physical illness, chronic, serious, and terminal illness as well.

I work with the palliative care population, so I see this day in, day out.

And here are just a few of the many diagnoses that cause an ongoing suffering.

We know that the prevalence rates of these things are so high these days.

And even with COVID, it's not just the fear and the panic, but even our loved ones dying, and dying in very inhumane ways.

Mentally, we are struggling 1 in 4 within, well, 1 in 5 in America, and then 1 in 4 in other parts of the country and of the world, struggling with a mental illness, depression, anxiety, trauma, suicidal thoughts, just to name a few.

And so with this struggle, with this suffering, how do we cope?

And I want to quickly review how we typically cope.

So kind of to first address how we cope and how we should be coping instead.

I'll be using an analogy of sailing in life just to kind of make it more present and applicable to us.

And so the first step, again, this journey of suffering, a lot of us are barely just alive.

So you're alive, you're breathing, you have a pulse, but you have no hope, joy, meaning, or even drive to want more or to make change in your life.

Often it's because of the struggles in life and after suffering for a while that perhaps you get used to that it becomes a routine and in some ways a way of life.

Again, just alive, going through the motions.

And so if this was an analogy of a boat, for instance, perhaps you were in the boat and you've had a lot of waves and storms and you tried fighting it, but you've just kind of given up.

So now you're just kind of floating in the middle of the ocean and maybe a storm comes, we hide in the cabin, wait for it to pass, and it actually seems a little bit more pleasant because you don't feel like you have to struggle or fight the storm, but also you're not going anywhere.

You're trapped in the middle of the ocean and there's no progress in life.

Some of us, when we struggle with suffering, we just are alive.

So maybe you know there are still struggles but now you have a bit more effort and and wanting to address them.

Not completely but just a little bit more energy, a little bit more effort but not enough to actually feel like you're striving or thriving in life.

And so again, going back to the boat illustration, this might look like, you know, you're tired of just sitting in the middle of the ocean, so you start to steer a bit or maybe put up the sails, but still not that much effort.

But you're beginning to experience more hope.

You begin to think that what if life could be different?

What if I didn't have to struggle all the time?

And you realize maybe you have a little bit more control of your life than you recognize.

Again going back to the boat, Perhaps you decide to get a new boat because the boat was causing you difficulty or maybe you enrolled in a class of learning how to better sail.

You're making some efforts but still still kind of struggling.

And again throughout all these illustrations and examples asking the question which ones me?

So you notice that no matter what step you're in, there will always be struggles.

But now this time with thriving, there's also hope as it was with striving, but there's something almost strange and odd about your reaction.

It's almost as if the struggles don't bother you so much.

And in some ways, maybe you even welcome them.

So to give again an example, maybe so you got the new equipment or maybe you took a lesson and now not only, new lesson and a new boat perhaps, but you also have a different attitude.

You no longer see the waves as challenges.

You see them as an adventure, as something that you can conquer.

And even in some ways, maybe the calmness of the ocean becomes almost something that you you don't enjoy because you want to grow and challenge yourself.

We want to not just be alive, we don't just want to be surviving, we may start making efforts to strive, and we ultimately want to thrive.

And subtitled, making meaning in suffering, which sounds again, odd.

So the first step is acceptance and there's kind of sub steps to all of this.

But the first step of thriving during suffering is acceptance.

Most of us think that life and the pursuit of life is happiness.

And not only is it fleeting, but it's almost impossible because of the fact that we live in a very broken and difficult world.

And so not only do We strive for happiness, but we often try to avoid suffering.

But what's interesting is what we avoid, and we teach this often in therapy, is what we often avoid grows.

So for example, if you avoid the weeds, what happens?

And so we shouldn't be avoiding suffering.

Is there a different way in which we should approach suffering?

Instead we need to accept the pain and the suffering.

We have to accept it because pain is inevitable.

Viktor Frankl, he was a psychiatrist and I'll give you the first part of this quote because I'll give you the second part later, but he says to live is to suffer.

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Alive, Survive, Strive and Thrive: The Journey of Suffering

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