TLDR: Jack Kornfield identifies two distinct categories of suffering: the suffering you run from, which persists and compounds because avoidance feeds it, and the suffering you turn toward, face directly, and move through—which paradoxically becomes the doorway to liberation. The core insight is that our relationship to pain, not the pain itself, determines whether it imprisons us or frees us. By cultivating the courage to meet difficulty with awareness rather than resistance, practitioners transform suffering into the very condition that dissolves bondage.
What Is the Fundamental Difference Between the Two Kinds of Suffering?
Kornfield's teaching rests on a deceptively simple observation: there are two entirely different paths suffering can take, and the difference lies not in the intensity of the pain but in whether we flee from it or face it. The first kind—the suffering you run away from—creates a cycle of evasion. When you resist, deny, or push away difficult experience, that energy of avoidance actually amplifies the very thing you're trying to escape. Anxiety about pain becomes as much a problem as the pain itself. Fear of sadness compounds sadness. Resistance to loneliness deepens isolation. In this dynamic, suffering gains momentum through neglect and denial.
The second kind is fundamentally different: it is the suffering you are willing to turn toward, to look at directly, and to move through. This is not masochism or suffering-seeking behavior. Rather, it is the willingness to stop running, to pause in the middle of difficulty, and to meet what is present with conscious attention. When you turn and face suffering in this way, something shifts. The very act of conscious contact transforms the experience. Instead of being chased by pain, you become the one who can look at it, understand it, and ultimately move beyond it. This becomes the gateway to liberation because in that moment of facing what is, you reclaim your agency and access the freedom that lies on the other side of complete acceptance.
Why Does Running From Suffering Make It Worse?
The mechanism here is rooted in basic human psychology and contemplative wisdom. When we reject an experience, we create a second layer of distress—we add fear and resistance on top of the original difficulty. A financial setback becomes not just financial stress but anxiety about whether we can handle it, shame about our failure, and dread about the future. Grief becomes grief plus the struggle against grief, creating an inner war.
From a Buddhist perspective, this aligns with the teaching that suffering arises not from experience itself but from our relationship to experience—our clinging, aversion, and delusion about what's happening. When you run from something, you are in a constant state of aversion and refusal. You expend enormous energy trying to keep it away, which ironically keeps it very much present in your attention. Someone avoiding anxiety spends all day thinking about avoiding anxiety. Someone in denial about loss remains psychologically bound to the loss. The avoidance becomes a cage.
Additionally, when you don't process pain directly, it gets stored in the body and psyche. Unprocessed grief, unacknowledged fear, and undigested failure continue to exert pull on your attention and emotion. They surface in unexpected moments—triggered by a song, a smell, a comment—because they were never truly metabolized. The suffering doesn't disappear; it goes underground and resurfaces, often in more twisted forms: irritability, numbing, addictive behavior, or chronic tension. Running away does not work because suffering is not something you can outrun.
How Does Turning Toward Suffering Create Freedom?
The paradox at the heart of Kornfield's teaching is that freedom emerges on the other side of full consent to what is difficult. This is not a passive resignation or defeat; it is an active choice to stop fighting and start investigating. When you turn toward suffering with curiosity and care instead of judgment and fear, you begin to see it more clearly. You notice what the suffering actually contains: not just pain, but also information, texture, boundaries, and sometimes even unexpected softness.
In the moment you face suffering rather than flee it, you also reclaim your power. Instead of being controlled by the impulse to avoid, you become the conscious agent of your own response. You can choose how to relate to the difficulty. You might move toward it with compassion. You might seek understanding. You might reach out for support. You might sit with it in stillness. All of these become possible only when you stop running.
The liberation Kornfield speaks of is not the absence of suffering—in a human life, pain is inevitable. Rather, it is freedom from the secondary suffering created by our resistance to pain. When you stop fighting your difficulties, they lose their power to control you. The grief that seemed overwhelming when denied becomes workable when accepted. The fear that drove desperate avoidance becomes manageable when looked at directly. The shame that multiplied in secrecy begins to dissolve when brought into the light of awareness and, often, the compassion of another person.
This is also why Kornfield emphasizes turning toward rather than merely tolerating. Turning toward implies a gesture of care, interest, and even tenderness directed at the difficult place. You might place a hand on your heart and breathe. You might ask yourself with genuine curiosity: What is this? Where do I feel it? What does it need? This quality of attention itself is healing.
What Does It Mean to "Go Through" Suffering?
Going through suffering is not about prolonging pain or wallowing in it. It means moving from avoidance into conscious engagement, staying present with the difficulty long enough to digest it, learn from it, and emerge on the other side transformed. Some suffering is acute and resolves relatively quickly if you don't resist it. Other suffering is longer-term—grief over the loss of a relationship, the slow realization of a limitation, the integration of a major life failure.
Going through involves several movements: First, noticing and naming what is happening. Second, stopping the fight against it. Third, finding the courage to remain present with the discomfort. Fourth, discovering what wisdom, compassion, or understanding becomes available once you stop running. Fifth, allowing time and continued conscious attention to complete the process of integration.
In Buddhist meditation practice, this is sometimes cultivated directly. A meditator might sit with physical pain or emotional discomfort without immediately adjusting the posture or distracting the mind. Over time, this builds capacity to be present with difficulty. The practitioner discovers that suffering, when met with calm attention, does not escalate infinitely. Pain has edges. Emotions move and change. Difficult thoughts lose their grip. There is a space of awareness in which all of this can be held.
How Does This Teaching Apply to Everyday Life?
Kornfield's distinction is not merely abstract philosophy—it has concrete applications for anyone navigating loss, conflict, illness, shame, or any form of human difficulty. If you are in grief, the cultural impulse to "move on" quickly or to suppress sadness in the name of strength actually prolongs suffering. Grief that is allowed, witnessed, and integrated moves through the system more completely. Friends and family who sit with someone in their grief—rather than trying to fix it or cheer them up—often notice that the grieving person finds peace more naturally.
In conflict, running away means avoiding difficult conversations, which leaves wounds festering and resentment growing. Turning toward conflict with a willingness to see the other person's pain and to articulate your own, however uncomfortable, creates the possibility of actual resolution. This does not guarantee agreement, but it transforms the dynamic from one of evasion to one of honesty.
In the context of illness or chronic pain, the research is clear: acceptance and gentle engagement with the body produces better outcomes than denial and struggle. Pain catastrophizing—the tendency to imagine the worst about pain and to resist it mentally as well as physically—actually increases suffering and prolongs recovery. People who can acknowledge pain while also tending to their healing, maintaining some movement or activity, and engaging their social connections tend to recover better and suffer less.
With anxiety and fear, again, avoidance typically makes things worse. Someone afraid of public speaking who cancels presentations reinforces the fear and limits their life. Someone who acknowledges the fear and speaks anyway discovers that the fear is survivable, the actual event is workable, and over time, the fear itself diminishes. The turning toward is sometimes terrifying, but it is the only path that actually works.
Where to Go From Here
Kornfield's central invitation is to examine your own relationship to suffering. Where are you running? What pain, grief, fear, or shame are you still trying to outrun? What would it feel like to stop and turn around? The specific practice might be as simple as sitting quietly and allowing yourself to feel a difficulty you've been avoiding, with the knowledge that you don't have to fix it or resolve it—just meet it. Many people find that the feared experience, when finally faced with breath and tenderness, is far less overwhelming than the fantasy of it created by avoidance.
For longer engagement with these teachings, Kornfield's work—including his books, courses on mindfulness fundamentals and opening the heart of forgiveness, and his monthly teachings through The Year of Awakening—offer frameworks for working directly with difficulty. The underlying principle is always the same: suffering becomes the gateway to liberation not because we seek it out, but because we stop fleeing from it and instead, with courage and care, turn to meet it directly.
