My Stomach Has Hurt for 565 Days. I Finally Found Peace That Doesn't Wait for the Pain to Stop.
Published: July 13, 2026 • 8 min read
The tears almost fell across my face.
I was sitting across from the gastro surgeon, my mum beside me, my stomach hurting like always. He had just looked over every report from the days of tests I had run, the gastroscopy, the abdominal CT scan, the stool analysis, the whole range of blood tests, plus the colonoscopy from earlier this year. Then he told me he still couldn't figure out the issue.
I was going to have to see a gastroenterologist and run even more tests.
It had been a rough weekend of going back and forth between hospitals to run every one of these, and for what? Nothing?
I solve problems for a living, yet I could not find a way to fix the one problem sitting inside my own body.
My mum glanced at me, saw the tears building, and held my hands. In that moment, I remembered a book...
A couple of people I respect recommended The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle at the Future Proof Creator Summit I attended back in June, so I picked it up.
So far, I'm only four chapters in, so I am not going to pretend I have mastered the principles.
But those four chapters alone were enough to teach me that while pain and suffering sound like two words for the same idea, they are not the same. And the gap between them is where almost all of my unnecessary misery, and perhaps yours too, has been hiding.
Pain is what is actually happening to you right now. Suffering is what your mind does with that pain across time.
I Confused These Two Words My Whole Life
Pain might be physical, an ache in your body that is happening as you read this. It might be a loss that genuinely just happened, a job that ended, a person who left, a plan that fell apart. It is real and oftentimes agonizing.
But suffering, I just recently learned, is something else...
Suffering is the story your mind wraps around the pain. It is the replay, the rehearsal, the bracing, the wishing. The one line from the book that reorganized my thinking states:
"Suffering needs time. It cannot survive in the Now."
— Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
By "Now", I mean the present moment.
The actual sensation of pain exists in this exact second. But the suffering, the heavy part, the part that follows you around all day, needs somewhere to live that this very second cannot give it.
It needs a yesterday to regret or a tomorrow to dread.
Take away the past and the future, and the suffering has no room left to stand in.
Time only runs in two directions. So if suffering needs time to survive, then it only has two places to hide.
Behind you, and in front of you. Once I saw that, I started catching myself living in one or the other almost constantly, and almost never in the one place the suffering couldn't reach me.
My Brain Keeps Replaying a Past I Can't Change
The first hiding place is the past.
"Certain things in the past didn't go the way you wanted them to go. You are still resisting what happened in the past, and now you are resisting what is."
— Eckhart Tolle
As a natural overthinker, I am very prone to this. My brain tends to do that thing where it replays past scenarios where I imagine myself responding in a different manner - a manner that I convinced myself would've yielded a better result in the present moment.
I find myself replaying decisions I cannot undo and for a long time I thought that replaying was a form of taking responsibility, like if I felt bad enough about it, I was being a serious person.
But that is not what was happening. The event is already over. The pain of it had come and gone.
What I was doing was manufacturing fresh suffering, today, over something that had already finished happening. The past cannot hurt you. Your grip on it is what creates suffering.
Even Hope Was Feeding the Suffering
The second hiding place is not talked about enough because it wears a friendly face.
It is hope...
"Hope is what keeps you going, but hope keeps you focused on the future, and this continued focus perpetuates your denial of the Now and therefore your unhappiness."
— Eckhart Tolle
Now I don't think Eckhart is telling us that hope is bad. I still hope for things and I think you should too.
The trap is when a hoped-for future becomes the condition for being okay now. When the whole plan is "I will be fine once this arrives," you have already agreed to be not-fine until then.
And every time the thing you are gripping doesn't come, or comes late, the hope curdles into a fresh round of suffering.
This is where learning to hold things loosely becomes a fundamental skill to master for happiness in this world. It is a skill I am still working on mastering.
Wanting something is fine. Attaching your entire 'okayness' to it is how you hand your peace to a future that hasn't even shown up yet. That might never even show up...
The One Place the Suffering Can't Follow Me
So if the past and the future are where suffering lives, the present is the one place it cannot follow you. And Tolle gives an exercise for it that I have started actually doing, especially in those moments when I catch my mind slipping back into the past or racing ahead into the future.
"Narrow your life down to this moment. Your life situation may be full of problems, most life situations are. But find out if you have any problems at this moment."
— Eckhart Tolle
Try it right now. Don't think about your entire life situation.
Focus only on this moment. In this exact second, as you read this sentence, are you in danger? Is there a problem you have to solve in the next ten seconds? Almost always the honest answer is no.
The problems are real, but they live in the story of your day, your month, your year.
Right now, in the actual moment, there is usually just you and your breath and whatever is genuinely in front of you. Most of what is crushing you is not happening now. It is happening in your memory of the past, or the movie you've constructed of the future.
This Won't Make Your Problems Disappear
I am not telling you to be present and watch your problems evaporate. It doesn't work that way.
The bills are still due. The diagnosis is still real. The person is still gone.
Pain is not a mindset you can think your way out of, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably trying to sell you something.
Also, I am only four chapters into this book. I might finish it and find out I misread the whole thing.
I am not handing you a solution for pain. I am handing you a distinction, the same one this book handed me, because it has already changed how I carry the things that hurt as I live with a Chronic Illness.
The Stable Life I Keep Grieving
Here is where this gets personal for me. I've lived with IBS for 565 days now. One day my stomach was fine, and the very next day it simply was not.
The pain feels like I have a cement block sitting in my stomach. Some days I walk with my hands pressed to my lower back because I'm so uncomfortable, and it genuinely feels like I'm pregnant. This past weekend, a random lady saw me while bloated and prayed that I gave birth to healthy twins. I was in so much shock that I couldn't even be mad or bring myself to explain that I wasn't pregnant.
I have learned to live and smile through the pain. I always feel the need to hide it when I am around people, and there are days the pain is bad enough that I have to find a way to manage it before I get on a call with a client, because I don't want them to see me in real, physical pain.
With IBS you feel everything, every time. Every single movement in the stomach I feel it and it drives me nuts!
Let me paint you a picture of what my life looked like before then.
- I could meal prep once every two weeks and know exactly what I was having for lunch and dinner, every single day, for two weeks straight.
- I could eat vegetables, nuts, seeds and other sources of fiber without a second thought.
- I could schedule my day down to the minute and be sure it would go exactly as planned.
- I could make a promise to a friend and actually keep it, without bracing for the chance that my body might cancel on them through me.
- I could sleep through the whole night and wake up when my alarm went off, not when the pain decided.
- I could easily stay healthy and fit because my body accepted healthy foods. Now the cognitive dissonance of eating something healthy and watching it rip me into pieces drives me crazy.
Food was simple back then. Eating was a joy.
Now, with the pain, I keep catching myself doing one of two things. I would reminisce about that old, stable life where everything was predictable. Or I would project forward into some future where my body was finally normal again.
I grieved a sleep schedule that no longer exists, because the pain wakes me at 3AM and refuses to let me back down. I mourned the meals I used to be able to eat without a second thought. And I kept hoping, always hoping, for a tomorrow where my body simply behaves.
And that, right there, was the suffering.
Not the pain itself. The pain was just my body doing its thing. The suffering was me, gripping a past I could not return to and reaching for a future that had not arrived.
But with this new distinction, there is peace now. Peace despite the pain. And to be clear, this is not me giving up on getting better. I am still doing the work of adjusting the medications, the food, and the daily habits, and still learning to calm my nervous system.
Oh and, it is not perfect peace either. I promise you I still have my many moments of gripping the past and projecting into the future.
But at least now I know that peace is within reach. When the suffering gets too loud, I detach from time, I come back to the NOW, and I find it waiting there.
The Same Constraint Shapes How I Build
I believe the constraints have made me more creative.
I work in AI, where there's a new tool every other day, and I do not have the energy to chase all of them. This genuinely sucks because I want to do so much more… I want to know and explore so much more, but the sad reality is that I can't.
So I work with what I already know. I get creative about solving problems with what I have, and I've built or should say am still building the discretion to know when researching something new is worth my limited energy and when it isn't.
It turns out you are often the most creative when you are forced to work within limits.
And that, when I look closely, is the same acceptance the book handed me. I build for the body I actually have, not the one I keep wishing I had.
I'm Still Learning to Put the Bricks Down
Bottom line is that the pain, I mostly cannot choose. It arrives when it arrives. But the suffering, the replaying and the bracing and the wishing it were otherwise, that turns out to be the part I have been building myself, brick by brick, out of a past I cannot access and a future I cannot control.
And I don't think I am the only one who has been building that wall.
I am still learning to put those bricks down. Some days I pick every one of them back up again. And you probably will too, on your own hard days, and I believe that is normal since it takes a lot of practice to be able to focus on the present moment amidst pain.
However, it's worth giving a shot, so the next time something hurts, see if you can catch the exact moment your mind starts to reach. Backward, into what you have lost, or forward, into what you are afraid of or hope for. That reach is the suffering, not the pain itself. And just noticing it, without rushing to fix anything, is where it slowly starts to loosen its grip.
The pain might stay. Mine has, for 566 days now. But the suffering is the part you get to put down, one moment at a time, as many times as it takes.
Share this with someone who needs to see this perspective on the distinction between Pain and Suffering.