You’ve Got Friends

The Buddha focused his whole teaching career on dealing with the problem of suffering. As he one time said, that’s all he taught: suffering and the end of suffering. Suffering here is primarily mental suffering, the mental pain we feel. The word dukkha in Pali, in its everyday meaning, is just pain. Here the Buddha’s talking mainly about the mental pain we feel, which can be connected with physical pain in the present moment or with mental issues purely in the mind, old issues that hang on inside and weigh us down. Here the Buddha is offering us a path out.

When you think of the path, it’s good to think of it as a series of allies in dealing with your pain—particularly the first and last factors of the path: right view and right concentration. With right concentration, you take the breath as your ally. You try to step out of purely mental concerns and focus on the physical sensation of breathing. Then see what you can do to make that comfortable.

When I talk about the breath, it’s not just the in-and-out movement of the air, it’s the whole energy flow through the body. Often the problem is going to be right there in the energy flow. As the Buddha said, one of the reasons we suffer is because we breathe in ignorance. That leads us to hold things in strange ways in the body. So now we bring the light of awareness to how we breathe, how the energy is moving, and how we can shape that energy in a way so that it’s a good place to stay. This way, you have a place not only to step out from your thoughts but also to step out into a sense of well-being.

You’re going to need that sense of well-being because you’ll be looking at your mind to gain some insight into how the mind is creating suffering. You have to remember, it’s doing it out of ignorance, lack of skill. Or as Ajaan Suwat would sometimes say, it’s our own stupidity that’s making us suffer. We don’t like to see the stupid things going on in the mind, so we cover them up. Yet this is one of the reasons why the suffering hangs on: Part of us refuses to see why we’re suffering. So we have to prepare the mind to make it ready for anything—whatever is going to come up, whatever you’re going to see about the mind. They’re things you may not like to see about yourself but you’re not going to get rid of them until you see that they’re there.

They’ve been there for a long time but they don’t have to be there forever. There are ways of letting them go. But you can’t let them go until you see them. You can’t see them until you admit them, and you won’t admit them until you have a sense of well-being that you can fall back on so you don’t feel threatened by the unsavory or unpleasant things coming up in the mind.

So, try to get a sense of well-being here with the breath. In whichever part of the body you can find it, focus there. Sometimes you can get the whole body to feel good, other times only one part. But be happy to take that one part and hang out there. Then, as that one part gets more and more comfortable, you can think of the good energy spreading from there to other parts of the body. See how far it goes. Think of it seeping through and around and dissolving any hard or tight spots in the body.

There will be some that resist, and sometimes the resistance is not just physical. There’s a mental resistance going on as well. But you have to be patient. One of the tricks to patience is not focusing on the things that are hard to bear, but focusing on the allies you’ve got, the friends you’ve got inside, so that you’re not constantly harping on about how difficult a particular physical pain is or a mental pain is. You can instead focus on the things that are going well.

That gets into the second main ally you’ve got in the path, which is right view, gaining some understanding on why we suffer. Part of it’s because of old karma, part of it’s because of new karma. Karma tends to be regarded as a very unfriendly teaching, but it can actually be your ally.

Remember to begin with the thought right here in the present moment, as you’re seeing things coming from the past, that you have the choice in how you’re going to relate to them. The simple fact that a potential is there doesn’t mean you have to suffer from it. As the Buddha points out many times, the state of mind you bring to the results of old bad karma will determine the extent to which you’re going to suffer. It’s as if you have a fine that you have to pay. If you’re poor in the present moment, that fine is going to exhaust your resources. But if you’re rich in the present moment, you can pay it off easily. And “rich” here means having a larger view.

The teachings on karma not only talk about the mechanics of how things get shaped in the present moment, but they also have a very large time frame. This is one of the reasons why we think of thoughts of goodwill for all beings, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity—all the brahmaviharas—to all beings before we meditate to open up the mind to a little bit of infinity, at least for a few moments. That’s infinity in space. Also think, as the Buddha says, of the inconceivable beginning of time.

Which means that some of the karma you’re dealing with goes from way back. They talk about karmic justice, but it’s hard to say it really is just. Something may have been done when you were a very different kind of person a long time ago. It catches up with you now. See it simply as cause and effect, that it’s very impersonal. It’s not out there to catch you. And the simple fact that you’ve done something bad in the past doesn’t mean you deserve to suffer now. As I said, you have this choice. The potentials that come up, you can deal with them in a way that’s overwhelmed by them, or you can deal with them in a way where you overwhelm them if you have this larger frame of mind.

Have some goodwill for whoever you were that did that unskillful thing in the past. Have some compassion and then some equanimity. Learn how to extend those thoughts to yourself. That takes a lot of the personal sting out of the stories that tend to go with our mental pain. We’re in a much larger time frame, and that, too, helps you deal with the things that are coming up right now, with a sense that you have some allies.

You can frame the stories in different ways. If the mind resists, well, watch it for a while and see what the resistance is coming from. One of the peculiar things about the mind is that a lot of the painful things that we carry around have their allure. Part of the mind likes them. And again, that’s something we don’t normally want to see. But once the mind gets settled in the present moment with a sense of well-being and has this much larger time frame, a much larger sense of the world we’re in, then you’re in a better position to see, okay, this is what the mind is going for. When you can see it clearly, as I said, that’s when you can let it go.

This requires patience but, as I said, patience gets a lot easier when you have allies. You’ve got the ally in right concentration, you’ve got the ally in right view, so you’re not alone as you’re facing these things. You’ve got the Dhamma and you’ve got the example of the Buddha and the Sangha, and they’re all rooting for you. So accept their help. It’s offered freely.