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You're referring to Maria Popova’s essay “How to Make Use of Our Suffering: Simone Weil on Ameliorating Our Experience of Pain, Hunger, Fatigue, and All That Makes the Soul Cry,” originally published on Brain Pickings (now The Marginalian) in May 2015 (Transcend).
🌿 What Simone Weil Says
1. Consent to Suffering
Weil suggests that there is within us a deeper part of the soul that can consent to suffering, even indefinitely, if it aligns with divine wisdom. By accepting pain—rather than resisting or requiring it to end—we avoid a second, sharper form of spiritual pain that arises from soul-splitting resistance (Transcend).
2. Beyond Physical Pain
Her approach applies not just to physical discomfort but also to hunger, fatigue, fear, and emotional anguish. Instead of stiffening against these experiences, Weil proposes an internal stance of radical consent—even unto death—as a form of spiritual integrity (Transcend).
3. Contrast with Self-Discipline
Weil contends that passively embracing suffering imposed by fate is spiritually superior to voluntarily inflicting discipline on oneself; suffering thrust upon us can be given meaning through acceptance, whereas self-imposed austerity may lack transformative depth (Transcend).
✨ Broader Context from Weil’s Thought
Affliction vs. Ordinary Suffering
Weil distinguishes ordinary suffering—pain we can endure—from affliction (malheur)—a brutal devastation that crushes soul and dignity, often causing wholesale social and spiritual breakdown (Church Times).
Attention as Ethical Practice
Her philosophy centers on radical attention—an empathetic gaze that deprives the ego of focus to wholly attend to reality (or to another sufferer). This practice, she argues, is foundational to ethics, prayer, and even creativity (JHI Blog).
Creative Embrace of Necessity
Weil links suffering with decreation: the surrender of the ego to necessity. She believed that suffering—when met with consent—reveals how spiritual growth and grace can arise even under life’s implacable forces (JHI Blog).
🕊 Why Popova’s Essay Resonates
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Maria Popova brings Weil’s dense philosophical insights into concise, accessible prose, illuminating the interplay between body, soul, and meaning-making.
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The essay situates Weil’s reflections within First and Last Notebooks—written in her final months during World War II—as an intense record of spiritual resilience under privation and solidarity (Transcend).
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Readers often turn to Popova’s piece for a clear, moving introduction to Weil’s transformative vision of suffering.
🧘♀️ Practicing Weil’s Vision Today
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Notice your resistance—identify when part of you recoils from suffering and creates its own “second arrow.”
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Cultivate acceptance—even fleetingly—inwardly consenting to emotional or physical pain not to give in, but to dissolve the split within.
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Stay attentive—observing another’s suffering without distraction or judgment, asking honestly: “What are you going through?” This, Weil argues, is a radical form of compassion (Transcend, Ploughshares).
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Savor meaning, not escape. Rather than resisting suffering, attempt to transform it into a site of spiritual presence and growth.
📚 Further Reading
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Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks – the primary source for her late reflections on suffering.
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Weil, Gravity and Grace; Waiting for God – essays exploring affliction, attention, and decreation.
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The Marginalian / Brain Pickings – for more Popova essays on Weil’s broader work, including love, attention, and justice (Wikipedia, The Marginalian).
💬 In Summary
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Weil proposes that accepting suffering, rather than resisting it, can prevent spiritual fracture and transform pain into a profound statement of trust.
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Her distinction between ordinary suffering and affliction speaks to both bodily pain and existential despair.
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Attention—especially to suffering both personal and others’—emerges as a moral and spiritual practice of grace.
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Maria Popova’s essay renders Weil’s intense, often unsettling truths into artful, digestible prose that prompts deep reflection.
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Here are powerful quotes on suffering, drawn from philosophy, literature, spirituality, and psychology — including Simone Weil and others who deeply explored the human condition:
🕊 Simone Weil
“The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering, but a supernatural use for it.”
— Gravity and Grace
“The soul is not a compensation for pain, but its form and its fruit.”
— First and Last Notebooks
“To suffer passing through suffering—while contemplating it—is the only way to find truth.”
🌿 Fyodor Dostoevsky
“The darker the night, the brighter the stars. The deeper the grief, the closer is God.”
“It is not suffering that is to be feared, but the meaninglessness of suffering.”
🔥 Kahlil Gibran
“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”
— The Prophet
🌑 Carl Jung
“There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own soul.”
🕯️ Viktor Frankl
“In some ways, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.”
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
— Man’s Search for Meaning
🧘♂️ The Buddha
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
“As a solid rock is not shaken by the wind, so the wise are not moved by praise or blame, pain or pleasure.”
✨ Rainer Maria Rilke
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
— Letters to a Young Poet
💠C.S. Lewis
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain. It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
— The Problem of Pain
🧬 Helen Keller
“Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”
Would you like these quotes arranged by theme (e.g., healing, growth, spiritual insight), or made into shareable cards, slides, or art pieces?
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