Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. No Arrows, Nothing
     … If your present karma is unskillful, you can suffer from even really fine conditions. If your present karma is skillful, then no matter how bad the situation in the body, the mind doesn’t have to suffer. The minds of arahants are totally free from suffering. They’re like the rest of us in that their bodies have pain and pleasure and neither-pleasure … 
  3. A Light in the Darkness
     … I recently received a letter from a doctor who was claiming that modern psychology has made an advance over Buddhism in that Buddhism deals only with the problem of suffering, while modern psychology deals with suffering and also gives meaning to life. I don’t think he understands the depth of the problem of suffering. Once you really eradicate suffering, what remains to your … 
  4. Monologue on the Breath
     … Where is there discomfort, suffering, stress—however you want to translate *dukkha. *There are different levels of dukkha, so you can think of it as spreading out among these words. Sometimes it’s simply a little bit of stress or a little bit of discomfort, a sense of construction or tightness. Doesn’t feel like any great suffering. But it still qualifies as a … 
  5. Training Your Minds
     … If your happiness involves the suffering of other people, there are going to be a lot of problems down the line. So you want to ask yourself: What kind of happiness would not cause other people to suffer? Well, it is possible to develop a sense of well-being purely from developing your inner resources. That’s what we’re doing as we meditate … 
  6. Encouraging Perceptions
     … This is a skill that requires time, requires patience, so that we can comprehend suffering, let go of its cause, develop the path so that we can experience or verify for ourselves that there is a cessation to suffering. The hard part here is comprehending the pain, because pain, both physical and emotional, is something we tend to run away from. Who wants to … 
  7. Frame Your Questions Well
     … And as long as you think in those terms, you’re going to suffer. The way out is to start thinking in terms of actions and results. Look at the Buddha’s own quest. As he said, we start out bewildered by suffering and begin to realize that true knowledge would be seeing how to put an end to suffering. And who knows how … 
  8. The Wheel of Dhamma
     … But the Buddha pointed out that the best way to do it for the purpose of overcoming and putting an end to suffering is to see things in terms of these four truths or four categories: stress or suffering, its cause, its cessation, and the path to its cessation. The first step is to learn how to identify exactly what in your experience is … 
  9. A Refuge from Aging, Illness, & Death
     … We forget about all of the suffering that goes on around those things. Of course, the fact that we’re missing them now so intensely means that when we gain them again, we’re going to lose them again, and suffer again, just as intensely. The question is: When are you going to have enough? In the king’s case, he had no sense … 
  10. Strong-hearted
     … We tend to think pain is suffering, and in Pali they use the same word for both. But when the Buddha defines suffering, it’s clinging to the five aggregates. This shows it’s not just ordinary pain. It’s something the mind is doing. We try to understand these things—why? Because we want to put an end to suffering. Why do we … 
  11. The Primacy of the Mind (2)
     … After all, with the four noble truths, when the Buddha searches out the causes of suffering, they don’t come from outside—they come from within. It’s because of craving and ignorance that the mind creates suffering for itself. When you look at dependent co-arising, you find the same thing: Almost half of the factors are prior to sensory contact, our knowledge … 
  12. Actualizing Your Potentials
     … But of course, the issue of suffering keeps forcing itself on all of us, and it’s important that we understand where it actually comes from, because that helps us prioritize. As the Buddha said, the real suffering in the mind comes from craving and ignorance, and specifically, three kinds of craving: craving for sensuality, craving for becoming, craving for non-becoming. It’s … 
  13. Breath Teaches the Bramaviharas
     … The circulation gets cut off to a particular organ because the breath energy’s been cut off there, and it’s going to suffer. But that can be remedied. So this is a lesson in compassion: Just because someone is suffering doesn’t mean they have to keep on suffering. That applies to you, and it applies to other people too. The teaching on … 
  14. Unburdensome, Part 2
     … You’ve got to be sensitive to how you’re creating your own suffering, and it’s going to be in areas where you’re very much attached. After all, by definition: The suffering is in your attachments. And those are areas where we tend to be very insensitive to where we’re being burdensome, and insensitive to where our attachments are inappropriate. So … 
  15. Understanding Goodwill & Equanimity
     … There’s part of the mind that says, “I’d like to see them suffer a little bit, to get a taste of what they’ve been handing out to other people.” But think about it: Often when people are suffering from their unskillful actions, they don’t stop. They can often become even more and more unskillful. So, ideally you’re hoping that … 
  16. Seriously Happy
     … And before he even said Hi, he said, “You know, I don’t have any suffering in my life.” He probably heard that the Buddha talked about how life was suffering—although the Buddha never really said that life was suffering. But, at any rate, the guy started in about how he wasn’t suffering. As he told us about his life, it sounded … 
  17. Just Rightness
     … You don’t want suffering; you do want an end of suffering. But the question of whether your actions mean you’re a good person or bad person, someone who deserves to suffer or doesn’t deserve to suffer: That doesn’t enter into the equation at all. Just look at the arising and passing away of suffering, trying to figure out where it … 
  18. Admit Your Stupidity
     … But the questions always revolve around: “Where’s the suffering? What is the suffering? What am I doing that’s suffering or causing the suffering? What can I do to learn to stop?” That’s what appropriate attention is all about. It asks those questions and it asks the questions that are related to the duties of the four noble truths as well. “How … 
  19. The Duty to Understand
    In the first noble truth, the Buddha defines suffering or stress—the Pali word is dukkha—as the five clinging-aggregates, and the clinging is the important part of the compound there. The suffering that eats into the heart is made up of those five types of clinging: clinging to form, clinging to feelings, clinging to the perceptions or mental labels, clinging to thought … 
  20. Feeding on Feeding
    Feeding on Feeding November 11, 2011 There’s a saying in Thailand that if you haven’t suffered, you usually don’t go to a monastery, or you don’t go to stay. This is one thing we all have in common: We’re here because we see that ordinary pleasures are not enough. We’ve all suffered in one way or another and … 
  21. An Issue of Control
     … But if you come at them at a point where they’re suffering from pain, and you say, “Would you like to have the choice not to suffer?” that’s where nobody really wants determinism. They want to have that opportunity not to suffer, and the Buddha says it’s real. So take that as a working hypothesis. As he said, if everything were … 
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