19min chapter

The Way Out Is In cover image

Being with Painful Feelings (Episode #73)

The Way Out Is In

CHAPTER

Embracing Suffering for Growth

This chapter explores the Buddhist perspective on suffering, illustrating how understanding and accepting pain can lead to personal growth and enlightenment. It emphasizes the importance of mindfulness practices to cultivate a healthy relationship with pain and happiness, highlighting their interconnectedness. Listeners are encouraged to engage deeply with their struggles, finding a balance that fosters healing and appreciation for the present moment.

00:00
Speaker 1
Whether it is physical, whether it is emotional, and part of the Buddha's journey in understanding spiritual investigation was how can he touch deep freedom and deep awakening and that is the path that helped him inquire and then give up everything he had in order to commit his whole being into exploring a way to understand suffering. And so when we speak about pain, we speak about suffering. And we know in the teachings of Buddhism, suffering is a noble truth. It is the first noble truth of Buddhism and this lets us know that if we have an opportunity to look at suffering with the eyes and the lens of mindfulness, we have a big opportunity and this opportunity is that we can learn from our suffering. We can even learn from our pain and in our times and I don't I I wouldn't even just say it's our moderns time, but I would say like many many lifetimes many generations We have the fear of being with suffering we have the fear of being with pain and because of this fear and because of this, this habit of avoiding pain, we have created many, many pathways to run away from it. And in our modern times, we have devices, we have consumerism, we have eating, we have doing like almost like every activity that that we can experience in a way it is to run away from the pain and the suffering. And because sometimes we don't have the insight in knowing how to be with the pain and the suffering. Therefore, we continue this cycle of running and this cycle of avoiding. our teacher Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, who we refer as Thay, has explained that there is goodness in suffering. And if we know how to look deeply into suffering, we will know how to suffer. And the key is we know how to be with pain, we know how to embrace pain, and we know how to transform pain. We know how to heal pain. And so I think this is a wonderful topic that we can explore today. Because I think it is a deep aspiration for all of us in having the ability, whether we call it tools or skill sets or in our language, we have a practice to be with pain. And
Speaker 2
brother, just to be clear, when the aim is not to eradicate pain, and the reason I say that is because a lot of people think that actually transforming pain is eradicating it for life, but actually then you can be happy. But one of the things during the research when we were writing our book, Being with Business, which comes out later this year, is that Thay wrote a letter to the monastics talking about, you know, that the Buddha suffered throughout his life, that he was nearly assassinated a few times, or assassination attempts against him, that his old kingdom was invaded by an evil king and taken over. And that Thai himself, you know, during the Vietnam War, suffered immensely. And he said, actually, the suffering is a way to actually understand ourselves and to find a pathway through. So can you just talk about that we're not trying to say no more pain ever? If
Speaker 1
we think about it, it's impossible. It really is impossible to eradicate, to erase pain and suffering. And our teacher speaks on this in a very loving way, because sometimes we have a notion we are religious or we practice spirituality in order to arrive, maybe in our next life or after death, to in Buddhism, this notion of the pure land of the Buddha, or in Christianity, the Kingdom of God. And we may think that that destination where we will come to is a place where there is no suffering and there's no pain. And that is a notion, that is a view. And I just remember Thay teaching us that I would never want to send my student to a place where there is no pain and no suffering. to this location, this destination, my students will never have the opportunity to learn and to grow as a human being. So pain and happiness are two pairs, or we can say suffering and happiness, are two pairs in Buddhism where the Buddha emphasizes his teaching directly to the two at the same time, not one instead of the other. But when we speak on suffering, we have to see it coexisting with happiness. And when we are taking care of our happiness, we are also taking care of our pain and our suffering. And these two pairs, they coexist, they are like light and darkness, up and down, like all the pairs of opposites. So these two, these two fundamental elements in life are very important elements of our ingredient in spirituality. So, Thay has an approach that he looks at. He gives the image like a rose. When a rose blossom is beautiful, it offers its freshness, its colors, its fragrance. But the rose also has the nature of impermanent. And the rose will turn into compost. But a practitioner is not afraid when the rose is not fresh anymore and the rose is not there anymore because it knows that the rose returns back to the earth and nourishes the earth which generates more roses. So our relationship to pain and suffering and pain and happiness as a meditator, we see it in a very different light. And so already understanding that pain and suffering is a very important element of spiritual growth or as a growth as a human being in general. We can start to remove some layers of our views towards suffering. it also like if we have experienced hunger we will know the value of food and so if we've never experienced being hungry sometimes Thay would instruct us to practice fasting at least once a year for example in order to know the difference of having something in front of us. And something even more stronger, Thay would say is, sometimes we don't value peace because we live in peace. But for someone like Thay who has experienced war, he will never take a peaceful day for granted. And that becomes a root of insight in his understanding because he's gone through so much suffering, so much despair, so much killing that the peace that he is able to experience in 24 hours, this is the greatest gift. So it offers deep perspective to understanding. And understanding is one of the fruits of meditation. It is insight. It is enlightenment. So when we can touch our own pain and our own suffering, that is mindfulness already, just knowing that we suffer. And how many of us suffer without knowing we suffer, and we create more suffering, and we indulge ourselves also in suffering. We can also become attached to suffering. We can identify with a suffering. And when we practice meditation, the first wing in meditation is stopping to slow down, to allow our mind to be still so it can reflect and so that you as an individual can see clearly why there is pain. noble truth in Buddhism that the Buddha has offered us, it is the root of our pain, the root of our suffering. And this is very important because the Buddha and Thay has emphasized that everything needs food to survive. So when we suffer, it is because it is being nourished. So we have to have the ability to look deeply to see where our way of living is it that we're cultivating this suffering. So when we start to have a relationship with our pain, with our suffering, a way out starts to appear
Speaker 2
in front of us. Thank you, brother. One thing before we get into the eight steps, although of course we're already entering those, is that you talked about the fact that people get caught in their suffering, but also people get caught in their happiness, which itself creates suffering because we were trying to avoid suffering and just chase after our happiness, whether that's through sex, fame, whatever, then actually that also leads to suffering. So one of the things I love about Buddhism is this idea of the middle way, which you're talking about, which is actually neither extreme work. To just go after our suffering is we're going to suffer even more, and just to go after our happiness will lead to suffering. So actually the path is to be with our suffering in order to generate happiness. But let's go to these eight steps because I know that in Buddhism, everything has a number. So there's the three doors of liberation, there's the four dharmasils of Plum Village, there are the, I think, is it 84,000 dharmadores or 87,000? Sounds about right. Well, it's lots of them. So do you want to sort of introduce us to how, first of all, why is it helpful to have a number of steps? And how did you come up or how did Plum Village come up with these eight steps? So a part of teaching,
Speaker 1
it's always helpful to put things into bucket in order to start to break it down. It's kind of like sometimes when we just talk about suffering or be with your pain, that's very general. the ability to articulate it and to just see it as a pathway. But like in all Buddhist teaching, don't be caught by step one, you may touch step three and then you're able to understand step one. And these eight were actually spoken recently in a retreat that we were doing in South and Sister True Dedication in her teaching. Her responsibility was to continue from my talk, which was I talked about the first four exercises of mindful breathing, which is recognizing our breath and then following our breath, developing our concentration and then being aware of our body and then releasing the tension in our body. And then the next set of four from the Buddha's time, it is cultivating joy and cultivating happiness. So I just want to speak very slightly here because we've done a whole two episode of a podcast on the 16 exercises of mindful breathing. So not to go too much into it. But we can even see 2600 years ago, the Buddha was already very intelligent in his teaching, like a doctor, like before you go into surgery, before you go into the pain and the injury of the body, you have to make sure you're healthy enough. You got to be strong enough, right? Like before we get into surgery, we meet a few doctors, there's a few steps before we arrive there. And one of it is like they had to check how well are we? Are we able to go under the knife, for example? So the Buddha had that insight. So before we tap into suffering, the Buddha teaches us and tells us the importance of having the capacity to generate joy and cultivate happiness. And it is not something that you can spiritually bypass. And I know a lot of us, when we listen to the word joy and happiness, we may have a reaction. We may think, oh, you know, that's so superficial or, oh, you know, joy, happiness is something like, you know, skipping down the road or just like doing something that is not important. And when we think about spirituality, it's like, let's talk about pain. Let's talk about suffering. Let's, you know, let's talk enlightenment, and so on and so on. But as a practitioner myself, I can share with all of us the deep responsibility we have to have as an individual and a collective to have the ability to touch joy and happiness in our daily life. And Tai in his renewing Buddhism and his way of teaching, he brings it really down to earth. That joy and happiness is not something that is far in the future, which all of our advertisement tells us, you know, invest here and you will receive this, you know, put all your effort in this path and you will get disposition and so on. And that is that that comes back. It plays on our fear of not enoughness. And so therefore we're chasing something in the distant. But when we talk about joy and happiness, Thay speaks about these two elements, present moment centered. Meaning in this moment, just coming back to your body, knowing that you have eyes that can see, that is joy. Having lungs that can breathe in air, there's no difficulty, that is deep Having two legs that are healthy that we can imprint our footstep on earth. We can feel the sand under our toes. We can hug a tree. We can hug a loved one. We can enjoy the taste of a tangerine. That is deep happiness. And so these two steps before we arrive at pain, we we can feel the sand under our toes. We can hug a tree. We can hug a loved one. We can enjoy the taste of a have to really identify as a practitioner, is that balance the middle way that you have mentioned? So as a practitioner, we have to be able to see that we are not forgetting, nourishing an important element in our daily life, which is having the ability to experience joy in the present moment and then recognizing happiness in the present moment.

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