Are You Still Holding the Burning Coal?
Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.
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Words: 1008 | Normal Reading: 5 minutes | Slow Reading: 10 minutes
Are You Still Holding the Burning Coal? (How to Have Complete Freedom From Suffering)
Imagine you’re holding a burning piece of coal. Your first instinct might be to drop it. Instead, you are clenching it with great determination, as if it’s heroic to burn yourself.
You are analyzing:
What kind of coal is this?
Maybe this is part of my growth.
Maybe I’m supposed to learn something from this pain.
This is how we handle suffering in life. We hold onto pain, believing it has a purpose or is just part of life. We fondly regarded it as a “challenge.”
Eckhart Tolle said: Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.
You’ve been struggling longer than you’d like to admit. Moments of relief keep you going, but underneath it all, there’s a persistent pain.
You’ve tried therapy, meditation, and spiritual practices. Some helped temporarily. But here you are—still searching, and possibly suffering even more intensely than before.
Why?
The Invisible Egoic Glove That’s Not Letting You Heal
You’re wearing an invisible glove—a protective layer of stories, beliefs, and mental narratives that your ego has constructed. These stories tell us that suffering is noble, that challenges build character, and that we must “tough it out.” The real problem is the illusion that suffering serves a purpose.
“This is just how life is.”
“Everyone struggles like this.”
“I’m building character.”
“Things will get better soon.”
These stories aren’t helping you—they’re keeping you trapped. Because if you felt the full intensity of your suffering without this protective barrier, you would drop that coal instantly. But the glove keeps the pain at a level where you believe you can handle it, where you keep holding on.
Then, something changes. Fierce grace manifests as more suffering because God has chosen you to awaken you spiritually.
At first, life feels harder. The things you once tolerated now feel unbearable. The protective barrier of the illusory glove begins to break. The suffering deepens. The mind tells you, This is just a rough patch. Things will improve. But they don’t.
In the meantime, the tear in your glove has grown; your hand wriggles uncomfortably with the intense heat of what you once happily saw as a ‘challenge.’
The pain keeps increasing. Eventually, you can’t fight it anymore. You surrender—not by trying, but because there is no other option. And you let go of the hot coal from your hands as the glove ruptured. The suffering vanishes because you see it was never real to begin with.
When the Guru Shows Up in Disguise With Its Grace.
There is a presence in your life—call it God, the Divine, the Universe, your True Self—that has chosen you for awakening. Not someday. Now.
This operates as “fierce grace.” It manifests as increased suffering, not to hurt you, but to dismantle the illusion keeping you separate from freedom.
Once you abide your mind in your inner Being—that is, God itself—from time to time, you will come across certain people, books, situations, etc., which will act as your Guru and push you inward toward your Being.
The Guru doesn’t “give” enlightenment—it simply removes what blocks it. Even before your life began, the real guru, God, has set things up to bring you to this point of surrender. For those who are ready, this process happens quickly, even painfully. But for those who still want to hold on to their suffering, the Guru steps back and says, Keep practicing the spiritual practice.
The Blessing of Being Caught in the Tiger’s Jaw
Let me provide a counterintuitive example involving a tiger and a goat to illustrate how humans perpetuate suffering. (Caution: You might find it violent or distasteful, but God—your inner Being—is all love.)
Here, the tiger represents God, while the goat symbolizes the ego.
Once a tiger catches a goat, there is no escape. Some goats realize this quickly and stop struggling, surrendering to divinity and allowing themselves to merge with it. The tiger then ends their suffering without much pain, twisting its neck swiftly. Others continue to fight, even though escape is impossible. They exhaust themselves until they ultimately pass out from blood loss with lots of suffering.
The tiger isn’t in a hurry. If the goat wants to suffer, it’s okay with him. Perhaps the goat enjoys the illusion of control, pretending it can escape. Why interfere? The tiger watches and waits; why rush if the goat wants to suffer?
Ultimately, the result is always the same—the outcome is inevitable once the tiger has chosen its prey. Some goats surrender early, others resist until the end, but the final destination is the same.
Or you might prefer another analogy of a river (river = God or Life)
Imagine you’re swimming in a river. The current is far stronger than you thought, pulling you downstream toward the ocean.
Some swimmers realize immediately: I can’t win this battle. They stop thrashing, turn onto their backs, and let the current carry them. The water supports them. They breathe, float, and relatively quickly reach the ocean, vast, limitless, peaceful.
Others fight. They swim furiously upstream, exhausting themselves, swallowing water, going under repeatedly. Eventually, their muscles give out. Only then, depleted and desperate, do they finally stop resisting. The current carries them to the same ocean that the others reached long ago.
When God chooses you, He expedites your awakening by giving you suffering so your mind surrenders inward. But if you don’t want to surrender, He doesn’t mind waiting as He knows that eventually you will surrender and end your suffering. The choice is yours: Surrender or Suffering.
The same is true for life. We struggle against what is, believing we have control. But the moment we surrender, peace arrives. The choice is not whether surrender will happen—it’s only a matter of when.
So I’ll Ask You One More Time
The suffering you’re experiencing isn’t random cruelty. It’s fierce grace bringing you home. But at some point, you need to let it go and surrender.
Your egoic glove is dissolving. Your illusions are shattering.
The Guru has appeared in countless forms, patiently dismantling what keeps you separate from peace. The process is underway. You can surrender now, drop the coal, rest in your inner Being, and realize God within.
Or resist. Analyze. Swim upstream. The Tiger will play with you anyway till you get exhausted, but you will waste years and years. Eventually, you’ll surrender anyway. The outcome is certain.
You are chosen for Awakening by God itself.
Are you still holding the burning coal?
It’s okay to let it go.
The problem I have with this analogy, is the necessary implication that ‘God’ (or whatever one chooses to call the spiritual reality—I prefer to think in terms of ‘Mind’, or better yet, ‘Self’, because that’s not associated with a plethora of religious baggage) doesn’t want, tolerate, or cause suffering. Being a ‘spiritual singularity’ it has no name (like the Tao says) but manifests as the material universe(s?) in order to have someone to ‘play’ with, so to speak. Materiality evolves and diversifies over billions of years (time doesn’t exist for Mind) to the point of true independent sentience where “ . . . the Self awakens from his many dreams and fantasies and remembers his true identity, the one eternal Self of the Cosmos who is never born and never dies.” [This taken from the poem “A Hindu Myth” by Reginald Horace Blyth] So . . . the point being that material existence inevitably involves suffering. So it is incumbent on all sentient beings to love one another, and minimize suffering for ourselves and others. And by extension, we should be the guardians and protectors of all life on this ‘pale blue dot in space.’
The egoic glove metaphor is increadibly sharp. What got me is how we literaly dress up suffering as character building or necessary growth. A few years back I caught myself doing exactly this with a toxic job situation, convinced the pain had somedeeper purpose. Once I dropped that narrative the relief was instant. The tiger analogy might ruffle some feathers but it nails the futility of resisting what's already happening.