Poetry, Pain, & the Art of Living

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Today’s episode is a follow-up to a previous meditation titled; The Sun is Always Shining and Three Ways to Say “Yes” to Life. One reader raised a thoughtful and essential question: How should we think about happiness, suffering, or gratitude amid physical pain and illness?

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Is it even appropriate to think (or say) words like happiness and suffering in the same sentence? To start, let’s distinguish physical pain from suffering. We’ll turn to a well-known Buddhist parable (The Dart of Painful Feeling).

The Buddha taught his followers, “Monks, when the uninstructed worldling experiences a painful feeling, he sorrows, grieves, and laments; he weeps, beating his breast and becomes distraught. He feels two feelings—a bodily one and a mental one.” [...]

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