What does it mean that the practice of sitting with suffering?

Not fleeing from pain but staying present with it builds emotional strength.

Example: A woman receives a call that her mother has been diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer's. Within seconds, her body launches its escape protocols. She opens her laptop and starts answering emails. She texts a friend about weekend plans. She pours a glass of wine, then another. She turns on a show she has already watched. Each action is a small door out of the room where the pain is waiting. By bedtime she has constructed an entire evening of avoidance so seamless that she almost believes she is fine. But lying in the dark, the knowledge returns — heavier now because it has been compressed rather than processed. The next morning she is irritable, distracted, snapping at her partner over nothing, because the suffering she refused to sit with has not gone anywhere. It has simply migrated underground, leaking into every interaction as ambient distress she cannot name. Had she stayed with the pain for even twenty minutes — let the tears come, felt the grief in her chest, sat on the couch and done nothing except be a person receiving devastating news — the pain would not have been smaller. But it would have been hers. She would have met it rather than running from it, and the rest of her evening would have belonged to her rather than to the elaborate architecture of avoidance.

Try this: Set a timer for fifteen minutes. Sit in a comfortable but alert position — upright in a chair, feet flat, hands in your lap. Close your eyes and bring to mind a source of current suffering — not your deepest trauma, but a genuine difficulty you are carrying right now. A relationship strain, a health concern, a professional failure, a grief. Let yourself feel it without narrating, analyzing, or solving. When your mind generates an escape — a plan, a distraction, a rationalization, a fantasy — notice the escape, label it silently as "leaving," and return your attention to the felt sensation of the suffering in your body. Notice where it lives: chest, throat, stomach, shoulders. Stay with the physical sensation rather than the story. When the timer sounds, write one sentence about what you noticed. Most people discover that the suffering, when met directly, is intense but survivable — and that the felt sensation changes shape over fifteen minutes in ways they did not expect.