Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. Getting Back on Your Feet
     … All too often when someone else is suffering, we instinctively take on some of their suffering energy. But it’s not helping them at all. We’re not taking anything away from them, in the sense that we’re not relieving them of their suffering energy. We’re just adding more suffering to the situation. So if you can learn how to breathe in … 
  3. Generating Good Energy
     … Compassion for when you see people who are suffering or who are doing things that are going to lead to suffering down the line—in other words, they’re creating bad karma. You’ve got to have compassion for them, to do what you can to alleviate their current suffering, and if you can find some skillful way to get them to stop doing … 
  4. Together but Separate
     … We can see the suffering they bring to the mind, because pain’s going to be there, and it’s going to go away, and it’s going to come back. It’s the nature of the body. There are going to be pains in the body. But the fact that we’re making ourselves suffer around it, that’s not necessary. Unfortunately, we … 
  5. Suffering Is a Feeding Addiction
    The way the Buddha describes our sufferings, they’re like a feeding addiction. We feed on pleasures, whether physical pleasures or emotional pleasures. We cling to these things. And clinging itself is a kind of feeding. So to treat the problem of suffering, we have to treat it the way we’d treat any other addiction. One, we have to realize that it’s … 
  6. Bless Yourself
     … Part of discernment is alertness on steroids—you’re very clear about what your actions are, you see where you’re causing yourself unnecessary suffering, and you can see how you can stop. Again, this is where ardency comes in. You remember what the Buddha said about how true happiness comes from letting go of anything that causes suffering, so you draw on your … 
  7. See Your Thoughts as Strange
     … They become a becoming, a whole world in which you take on an identity, and these states of becoming are what cause us to suffer. They require feeding, and the feeding entails suffering. In fact, the Buddha’s word for clinging, which he identifies with suffering, can also mean to feed. You take on this identity where you have to feed, which means you … 
  8. Always Willing to Learn
     … In fact, we have to if we want to put an end to suffering. What we’re doing is causing suffering, even though we don’t want to. The whole purpose of the practice is to catch ourselves doing things that we think will lead to happiness, but instead lead to suffering. So we have to be willing to change our habits—be willing … 
  9. Persistence
     … Ask yourself, “This mind state that’s coming up, where does it fall in the four noble truths? Is it an instance of suffering or is it an instance of the cause of suffering?” Suffering has to be comprehended to see that it’s in the clinging to the aggregates. And what is clinging? The Buddha defines it as passion and desire for the … 
  10. Good for What Purpose?
     … This may be one of the reasons why he focuses on the issue of suffering, stress, pain, because those are the facts that make you sometimes wonder: This view that you have of things, is it really good enough? Or is it actually part of the problem? When you can start asking questions like that, you can pull yourself out of your old habits … 
  11. New Eyes
     … The mind is engaged in the process of creating suffering and stress—and if that weren’t an interesting process, what is interesting in life? We all want happiness, we all want ease, we talk about bliss and rapture, and everybody wants to go there. And yet we keep creating stress and suffering for ourselves—one of the big ironies of life. And it … 
  12. Dhammacentric
     … For example, comprehending suffering: Comprehension is defined as putting an end to passion, aversion, and delusion. Abandoning the origination of suffering requires dispassion for craving. And the cessation of suffering is dispassion itself. So with those first three, you’re aiming at dispassion. You reserve your passion for the path, because you’ve got to do it well. That’s where the ardency comes … 
  13. Adjusting the Flame
     … You want to be able to discern suffering, as the chant said just now. It sounds strange. We all know that there’s suffering, but the problem is that we don’t really discern it: what it is, where it’s coming from, in all its gradations from stress up to big suffering. You have to put the mind in the right state so … 
  14. To Stay the Course
     … After all, when the Buddha analyzes suffering, he doesn’t talk about just any old suffering. He focuses on the suffering that the mind creates for itself when it’s clinging. And where does that come from? It comes from the mind’s own actions. It comes from its cravings. That’s the suffering that’s weighing the mind down. Without that suffering, outside … 
  15. Looking Inward
     … The Buddha says you can put an end to aging and death if you really look carefully inside, because the seeds of these things lie in our minds, in our hearts, and they can be taken out so there’s an end to all this suffering. So make sure that your gaze is focused inside all the time. This is the main work we … 
  16. Inner Strength, Inner Wealth
     … He did find the end to suffering. He was able to show it to other people. And there have been people who’ve practiced that way and found the results. Regardless of culture, regardless of age, gender: It’s largely the sincerity of their desire to approach the question of suffering in the most skillful way possible that they’ve been able to do … 
  17. Loss
     … Think of all the people out there who are suffering. The list just goes on, and on, and on. Thinking about the endlessness of this gives rise to a different emotion: terror, *samvega. *Sometimes samvega is translated as a sense of urgency, but it’s deeper than that, scarier than that. You think about life, the things you’ve accomplished, the things you enjoyed … 
  18. Streams of Anger
     … This is what the dynamic of the four noble truths is all about—wherever there’s suffering, turn around and look inside. Things outside may really be bad, but the suffering is not caused by the things outside. Look at dependent co-arising: Suffering doesn’t begin with unpleasant sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations. Those come in the middle of the sequence. It … 
  19. To Disturb Your Complacency
     … The way we engage in these types of fabrication is for the sake of happiness, yet we’re creating suffering. Sometimes we recognize the fact; sometimes we don’t. We have to remind ourselves the Buddha’s there to stir us up, to get us to question what we’re doing. So he brings up the facts of suffering, he brings up the facts … 
  20. Respect Your Center
     … If it doesn’t have its inner resources well developed, you can suffer an awful, awful lot. So here’s your opportunity not to suffer. You want to make the most of that. It’s your precious food. It’s the oil in the bowl that you don’t want to spill. So as we’re sitting here, learn how to find your center … 
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