So much of what you are saying is a combination of honest, reflective, and wise, however I disagree with one main point: "As strong-willed as humans can be, we cannot voluntarily sustain a state of suffering." As a person familiar with emotional masochism I would have to disagree. I think that the majority of people do sustain a state of suffering for a whole host of reasons that range from self hatred, a mirroring of ones past without awareness of personal responsibility for the imitation of parental emotional patterns (and perhaps even out of a loyalty to the family mantle of martyrhood and pain), to the simple desire to be in control, and so forth. With that said you are right: to yield is the only way. But (to play the devils advocate) I dare say that sometimes yielding is the very thing we forget when we become caught up in the cycle of playing the ever obstinate victim. To refuse to yield becomes the unhealthy obsession, and so we are lost to ourselves, lost to ourselves, lost to ourselves.