We live in a time that is deeply committed to the reduction of suffering. This is, in many ways, a moral achievement. We have language for mental health, access to support, increasing compassion in systems that once ignored distress. And yet, alongside this, there is a quiet risk: that all suffering becomes something to be removed as quickly as possible, rather than something to be understood, met, and, at times, allowed to do its work.
Simone Weil wrote with extraordinary clarity about this. For her, suffering—what she called affliction—was not simply pain, but an experience that strips away the false structures of the self. It confronts us with our vulnerability, our limits, our lack of control. It can feel like a descent. And yet, she saw in it a profound possibility: that when the ego is no longer able to maintain its usual defences, something else can enter. Attention deepens. Compassion becomes less performative and more real. We begin to recognise, not as an idea but as a lived truth, that others suffer too.
At the heart of this is humility. Not the social performance of being modest, but a profound reordering of perspective. Suffering humbles us because it reveals what we cannot control, cannot fix, cannot dominate. It interrupts the narrative that we are in charge of everything. In that interruption, something opens. We begin to see beyond ourselves. Our own experience is no longer the centre of the universe but part of a wider human condition. This is the beginning of compassion—not as a virtue we try to cultivate, but as a natural response when the self is no longer defended at all costs.
There is a parallel teaching, thousands of years earlier, in the Bhagavad Gita. At the centre of that text is Arjuna, standing on a battlefield, overwhelmed, paralysed, unable to act. His suffering is existential. He is not simply distressed; he is confronted with the collapse of his identity, his role, his certainty about what is right. And crucially, he does not bypass this. He does not distract himself. He does not suppress it. He stays in the crisis long enough for a deeper teaching to emerge.
What follows is not a removal of suffering, but a reorientation within it. Through his dialogue with Krishna, Arjuna begins to see that his distress is bound up with attachment, with identification, with the belief that he is the sole author of action and outcome. The teaching does not numb him; it liberates him from the illusion that he must control everything. In that release, action becomes possible again—not from ego, but from alignment.
Here too, humility is central. Arjuna’s turning point is not when he becomes stronger, but when he admits he does not know. He bows, not in defeat, but in recognition that his current way of seeing is insufficient. That gesture of humility allows a larger perspective to enter. What seemed unbearable becomes contextualised within something wider—dharma, order, meaning beyond the individual self. Compassion emerges here as well, because when we are no longer defending our own position so fiercely, we can perceive the complexity and suffering of others.
Simone Weil speaks of gravity—the force that pulls us toward self-concern, fear, contraction. The Gita speaks of attachment and the restless mind. Both are pointing to the same human tendency: to organise our lives around the avoidance of discomfort and the preservation of identity. Suffering disrupts this. It exposes the limits of ego. It can feel like falling. And yet, if it is held—not indulged, not suppressed, but held—it can become a movement toward something more spacious.
Humility is what makes that movement possible. Without it, suffering hardens into bitterness or self-protection. With it, suffering becomes permeable. We are less concerned with proving ourselves, more available to what is actually happening. In that availability, connection deepens—first with ourselves, and then with others. We recognise something shared, something human, something that does not belong to us alone.
In our work with young people, this presents a delicate balance. We are not asking them to suffer more. Many are already carrying too much. We are asking something more nuanced: that not all pain is an enemy, and that the capacity to be with discomfort—safely, gradually, with support—is a skill that protects them in the long term. When everything is immediately medicalised or removed, we can inadvertently reinforce the idea that discomfort is intolerable. That it must be fixed externally. That they cannot meet it.
The body becomes a crucial ally here. In yoga therapy, we are not analysing suffering in the abstract; we are helping a young person feel it in a way that is contained and workable. The breath slows. The nervous system settles. Sensation becomes distinguishable from overwhelm. In that space, suffering is no longer an undifferentiated mass. It becomes something that can be witnessed, and therefore something that can change.
And within that witnessing, humility quietly grows. A young person realises: I do not need to win against this feeling. I do not need to eliminate it immediately. I can be with it. That shift is subtle but profound. It loosens the grip of ego, and with that loosening comes a greater capacity to see, to feel, to connect.
There is a closeness that can arise here, something that both Simone Weil and the Bhagavad Gita gesture toward.