Most suffering comes from resisting pain, not from the pain itself

Chödrön distinguishes between primary pain — the raw, unavoidable discomfort of loss, disappointment, or fear — and the secondary suffering created by our frantic efforts to escape or suppress that pain the instant it appears. The reflex to distract, numb, blame, or fix immediately often causes more prolonged distress than the original feeling would have, left alone, ever produced.

Her argument is that this resistance is largely automatic and unexamined: most people never actually experience the full arc of an uncomfortable feeling, because they interrupt it within seconds with some coping strategy, meaning the feeling never gets to complete its natural course and dissolve.

She frames the practice, then, not as learning to feel less pain, but as learning to let existing pain move through without adding a second layer of struggle on top of it. The discomfort you can't avoid is usually smaller than the suffering you create trying to avoid it.