Like Greg, I injured my back through extremely strenuous work activity. I got a job to roof a house, and the faster I packed the roofing shingles up a ladder, the more I reduced the hours the same amount of money was split across, so I packed 3 90# bundles of roofing shingles up the ladder at a time, 270#. To make $30/hour, which was good money in the 1990s, I smashed all my lumbar discs and earned lifelong chronic pain.

As I learned to manage movement over the next several years to avoid spells of acute pain so severe I went into shock, I also learned that being in pain isn't necessarily suffering. Pain is just an aspect of the environment, and requires we use that feature of our environment just as we do wet grass, or any other aspect of our world, to enable us to manage our actions. Suffering is caused not by these features of our environment, but our expectations being met or not. When we expect something we don't get we suffer disappointment.

Thanks!