AROUND 2,500 years ago, a prince named Siddhartha Gautama was sequestered in a palace in North India, where his parents kept him removed from the suffering of the world.

One day, Siddhartha left the palace on a chariot ride and came across an elderly man, something he’d never seen before.

Everybody gets old, replied the chariot driver when the boy asked what he was seeing. One day, you will too. The boy couldn’t believe it.

The chariot then came across a sick man, another unprecedented sight. What has happened to that man? asked Siddhartha.

He’s sick, said the driver, a perplexing concept to a young and sprightly boy. And what is that? asked Siddhartha when the chariot finally passed a funeral.

That’s a dead man, said the driver.

What does that mean?

Death? It happens to all of us, no matter who you are.

When Siddhartha returned to the palace, his first experience outside of its walls sent him into turmoil.

What is the point of all of this? he wondered. What am I doing in this life if all the riches, the clothes, and even my body will one day be nothing but dust?

Over the next few years, Siddhartha realized that those in physical pain, illness, or poverty aren’t the only ones who know suffering; life afflicts us all, troubling the mind and soul just as much as the body, making even those with all the riches in the world susceptible.

A life of false pleasures within the palace walls was becoming meaningless to Siddhartha. Abandoning a child and wife, Siddhartha left the palace on a quest to perceive the ways of the world.

Today we know Siddhartha Gautama as the Buddha; his eye-opening experience as a lad became The First Noble Truth of Buddhism: Life is suffering and dissatisfaction.

We’ve come a long way in 2,500 years. Still, Buddhism’s First Noble Truth is as relevant now as it was in Siddhartha’s age, despite our technological advances.

As much as we want the quick fix, the answer, the antidote, there is no cure for suffering. So how do we deal with it? This is a question I’ve pondered continually over the past six years while trying to heal from chronic back pain.

I’ve recently come to understand that the way we heal from suffering is, paradoxically, by welcoming it in with open arms.

“You may have never felt good in your life but you have suffered, that’s for sure,” said author and life coach Martha Beck on ​this episode​ of the Andrew Huberman Podcast.

“If something is physically painful or emotionally painful, I used to say, let go, let go, to myself. It didn’t work. So one day I said, all right, you can stay. Let it stay. And so I do a let it stay meditation. If there’s pain let it stay. If there’s sorrow let it stay. And as soon as I let it stay, it begins to change.”

This mindset shift has been an absolute game-changer for me on my healing journey. We’re constantly telling ourselves to let go of the suffering, the weight, the hurt, the pain, the past.

Yet, like Beck says, does telling ourselves to let go ever truly work? I’ve been fighting the physical, emotional, and spiritual pain for a long time; it’s exhausting. Three months ago, I hit rock bottom.

Trying so hard to heal physically was only making me worse. The stars aligned to help me realize that my brain is creating pain in my body because of an over-sensitized nervous system, what is known as TMS (the mindbody symptom). The physical pain is a distraction from our emotions.

I’m now retraining my brain to understand that these emotions and feelings and experiences are okay. There is nothing to fear, no reason for the pain.

It takes work, and I’m still very much on the path, but my life is transforming. And all I really have to do to retrain my brain is simply let it stay.

This is the key to healing. Perhaps it’s the key to life.

Instead of fighting, we may welcome in whatever we feel, be it physical pain, an unwanted experience, or emotions such as sadness, anger, grief, sorrow, guilt.

What we resist persists. To heal chronic pain, to get through a sickness, to allow whatever we’re resisting to pass through us, welcome it in. Face it. Feel it. Give it the green light.

It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s such a relief to put your hands up and say, I will not fight this anymore. Come on in, pain! Do what you wanna do. You’re annoying, sure, but you can’t actually hurt me. I’m gonna keep living my life and let you run your course.

By allowing negative emotions and pain to stay, we release the resistance that perpetuates our suffering. We can fight what makes us human, or we can surrender.

Because maybe, as the Buddha realized, suffering isn’t merely to be avoided at all costs. It’s why we’re here. A world of only highs is no world at all, as 20th-century writer Aldous Huxley made clear in his novel ​Brave New World:

“We prefer to do things comfortably,” says Mustapha Mond, a controller of the dystopian World State.

“But I don’t want comfort,” says John, a character raised on a Savage Reservation outside of the sterile and prefabricated civilization.

“I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.”

“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”

“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.” 

“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.”

“I claim them all.”

As a young man, when John leaves the Reservation and experiences the World State for the first time, he realizes that a world with suffering is preferable to one where people are engineered and placed into a class, and where a drug, soma, cures all.

Like Siddhartha, John longs for a life outside of the palace walls, as a life without the depth of lows can only soar so high.

Maybe we’re not here to fix what we feel. Rather, with compassion, we may invite the pain in for a cup of tea in the garden of our soul, with an open ear to what it’s been trying to tell us all along.