A reflection from living, watching, and knowing
By Roshan Jayasinghe
Over time, I have begun to notice something.
It didn’t arrive all at once.
It was not given to me by a book or a teacher.
It came quietly, through years of living, watching, feeling,
and letting moments speak for themselves.
I began to see that pain and suffering are not the same thing.
The shape of it
If I were to put it into words, it would look like this:
Emotion + Feeling + Thought = Suffering
An emotion rises, the raw movement of life in the body.
A feeling follows, tightness in the chest, a lump in the throat, a heat in the face.
And then a thought arrives, telling the story of why this is happening, what it means, what it says about the world, or about me.
It is here, in the weaving together of thought and feeling,
that suffering takes its form.
The emotion by itself could pass,
like wind through trees.
But when the mind holds it, names it, and loops it,
it lingers.
The story’s grip
I’ve seen in myself that the mind does this not to harm,
but to protect.
It watches closely, too closely,
thinking: If I remember this, if I understand it completely,
maybe it will never happen again.
And so it builds a story.
Sometimes the story sounds like reason.
Sometimes like warning.
Sometimes like memory.
But whatever its shape, the story keeps the feeling tethered.
The moment becomes an identity.
The passing becomes the permanent.
It is a loop:
Feeling fuels thought.
Thought fuels feeling.
Round and round, until the present moment disappears,
and only the echo of what was remains.
The mind’s watching
It makes me think of that old song:
“Every breath you take…
Every move you make…
I’ll be watching you.”
It’s haunting because it’s relentless.
And in its way, that’s what the mind does,
watches every flicker of pain,
every tremor in the heart,
replaying and reinforcing it.
Not because it’s cruel,
but because it doesn’t know another way.
The gentle separation
In watching this in myself,
I began to experiment:
What happens if I let the feeling be here…
but set the story down for a moment?
The result was simple, and natural:
The feeling began to move.
The body did what it already knew how to do.
Tears came and went.
Heat rose and cooled.
Breath deepened.
And then, the stillness after a wave.
This showed me something I cannot unknow:
The suffering wasn’t in the feeling.
It was in the clinging to the story.
Nature’s reminder
When I look to the world outside, I see it everywhere.
The tree does not keep the storm.
The ocean does not hold onto the wave.
They feel.
They move.
They return.
Perhaps we humans have forgotten this.
We do not suffer because we feel too much.
We suffer because we do not allow what we feel to pass.
For whoever reads this
I do not offer this as instruction.
Only as something I have come to know in my own bones.
If pain rises for you one day,
perhaps you might notice:
What is the sensation in my body?
What is the story my mind is telling about it?
What happens if I allow the feeling, without holding the story?
I cannot say what you will find.
Only that, for me, in these moments,
suffering loosens.
And I remember that letting go is not forgetting,
it is returning to life, unbound.
Perhaps the body already knows how to heal.
Perhaps the mind can rest long enough to let it.
About the Author
Roshan Jayasinghe is a humanist thinker and emerging writer based in California. With a background in administration and a deep passion for social equity, he explores the intersections of politics, identity, and compassion through a lens grounded in nature’s own self-correcting wisdom.
Roshan Jayasinghe
Rooted in the belief that humanity can realign with the natural order where balance, regeneration, and interdependence are inherent. Roshan’s reflections invite readers to pause, question, and reimagine the systems we live within. His writing seeks not to impose answers, but to spark thought and awaken a deeper awareness of our shared human journey. Roshan will be sharing weekly articles that gently challenge, inspire, and reconnect us to what matters most.
