Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. The Gift of Discernment
    When we think of the Buddha’s compassion, the first teaching that comes to mind is often the brahmaviharas, in which he teaches us to develop goodwill for all beings, compassion for all who are suffering, empathetic joy for all who are happy, and equanimity so that these other three qualities don’t cause us to suffer from all the suffering in the world … 
  3. Don’t Clap Hands with Pain
    You hear it said again and again, how the Buddha said that life is suffering, even though he never said that. If he had said that, it wouldn’t have been all that useful. What’s the alternative? Death. What he did say was that there is suffering, and he enumerated a lot of the ways in which we suffer, things that we find … 
  4. Protect Your Energy
    When the Buddha analyzes the causes for suffering, one of the most basic points he makes is that we don’t suffer simply from having unpleasant sights or sounds or smells, tastes, tactile sensations, or ideas. We suffer from what we bring to these things, whether they’re good or bad. In fact, we can even be surrounded by all kinds of pleasant things … 
  5. Wise Endurance
     … Being with what is unpleasant, being with what is unloved, is one of the examples of suffering listed in the first noble truth. But remember: All the forms of suffering that are listed there boil down to the five clinging-aggregates: clinging to form, feeling, perception, thought fabrications, or consciousness. In particular, what are your perceptions, what are your thought fabrications about a particular … 
  6. Avoidance
    We all come to the practice for the same basic reason, the fact that we’re suffering and we’re stressed out. We want to be able to train the mind so that we don’t have to suffer from these things, but the way we understand our suffering varies from person to person. In some cases, it’s in line with the Buddha … 
  7. Compassion Without Clinging
     … But he is an expert in knowing how not to suffer. There are people who don’t want to suffer. His advice is for them. As in the case with ordinary everyday life: We live in families. There’s bound to be love and compassion for the other members of the family. We also know that the Buddha taught that clinging is suffering, and … 
  8. Goodwill for Bad People
     … Remember that the Buddha never talked about people “deserving” to suffer. Actions lead to consequences, that’s it. But the actual suffering, the suffering that weighs down the mind, is something that comes from present karma. You’ve seen people in bad situations and they’re not suffering. You’ve seen other people in good situations and they’re suffering horribly. So simply because … 
  9. Acceptance Without Suffering
     … In both cases, you begin to realize the power of your perceptions to make you suffer or to keep you from suffering. This is an important aspect of wisdom and discernment: that you can be with things that would ordinarily make you suffer but you don’t have to suffer. After all, arahants live in this world. They have bodies that have pains, they … 
  10. True to the Teachings
     … When the Buddha talked about suffering, he looked at the suffering in his own mind. When he talked about the cause of suffering, he looked at the cause of suffering in his own mind. When the Buddha talked about the fact that it’s possible to put an end to that, Añña-Kondañña followed the path of practice, and in his particular case, he … 
  11. The Gift of Goodwill
     … Then, as you face aging, illness, and death, you’ve got the tools you need to not suffer. And when you’re not suffering from those things, you’re placing less and less of a burden on others. Otherwise, people will see you suffering and, as things get worse, they’ll see that there’s nothing much they can do. When I was in … 
  12. Moving Between Thought Worlds
     … You can ask yourself, “Is there suffering here?” That’s the incongruity: We create mind states in order to enjoy them, but if they make us suffer, they’re out of line with their reason for being. Then you can ask, “Does there have to be this suffering?” And part of the mind will say, “Yes,” but you have to learn how to question … 
  13. Part V : Finding a Teacher
     … When you get better at this, when you know your mind a lot better, you can start rooting out deeper roots of suffering. As you see things arising and passing away, and you see the suffering that comes and the suffering that goes, the next question, of course, is: What’s causing that? This is where you have your magic bullet. The Buddha says … 
  14. Understanding Pain
     … All too often, we don’t deal with the cause; we try to fight off the pain immediately, without looking at what’s really causing the pain, especially when it has to do with the suffering in the mind. What’s causing the suffering? There may be pain in the body, but the mind doesn’t have to suffer from that. As they say … 
  15. Mature Strategies
     … He simply said that there is suffering in life. You can’t argue with him there. And he points out all the obvious sufferings we live with. Birth is suffering, all the pain that goes into being born and giving birth. Aging, illness, and death: These are all suffering. Being separated from what you like, having to live with what you don’t like … 
  16. Solid in the Face of Death
     … It keeps coming back for more and more of the same old stuff despite all the suffering involved. When you take a larger view like this, it’s a way of taking some of the burden off the mind caused by the personal problems of your daily life. You realize that you’re not suffering alone. Everybody is suffering. It seems paradoxical, but it … 
  17. Coping & Beyond Coping
     … The Buddha discovered that that was the source of our suffering. If we were able to cure that problem, then there wouldn’t be anything to suffer from. There would be no need to cope, because we wouldn’t be creating the suffering that would force us to have to cope. We realize that we suffer not because of things coming in at us … 
  18. The Noble Eightfold Path to the Deathless
     … You also hear him say that you can, through your own efforts, put an end to suffering. If you don’t put an end to suffering, suffering can just keep going on. From that right view come the other factors of the path. The Buddha compares your views about things to a seed. Wrong view, he says, is like a seed for a bitter … 
  19. Success on the Path
     … If it were the case that there wasn’t that potential for putting an end to suffering, that life was simply a matter of learning how to accept what’s already here, then the practice would be very different. But what the Buddha is asking you to do is to accept something else, that there is a potential to put an end to suffering … 
  20. Birth Is Suffering
    *Jātipi dukkhā. *Birth is suffering. I heard someone recently explaining the Buddha’s list of the different forms of suffering. He came to this one and he said, “Well, that’s behind us now.” The problem is that it’s not behind us. We have it behind us, but we also have it ahead of us if we’re not careful. Each time it … 
  21. Learning from Desire
    That phrase in the chant just now, “Those who don’t discern suffering”: It sounds strange. You’d think that everybody discerns suffering. Babies know suffering. They know enough to cry. Even common animals know when they’re in pain. But that’s not what the Buddha’s referring to. There are the kinds of suffering we all know about, and he lists them … 
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