The key to a happier life is learning how
to suffer better
One
of the Buddha’s key teachings — arguably the key teaching — is the four
noble truths, which tell us 1) that suffering happens, 2) that it happens
for a reason, which is that we cling, 3) that it’s possible for us to
reach a state where we don’t suffer (nirvana), and 4) that there are
practices that help us to attain that state.
Although
these four truths, or facts, might suggest that we can somehow learn to
avoid suffering, what’s really required is that we learn to deal better
with life’s sufferings, because they are inevitable. In other words, we need
to learn to get better at suffering. It’s not that we should seek
suffering, but that when it comes we can learn to respond to it in a way
that doesn’t cause us further suffering.
So
I have a few suggestions here to help you suffer better.
1. Accept that suffering is just a part of life
If
we think that we can somehow go through life on a blissful cloud, we’re
going to end up disappointed. And disappointment is just another form of
suffering. Thinking we can avoid suffering makes us think we’re failing when
suffering inevitably happens.
2. Know that suffering is not a personal failure
It’s
very easy for us to form the impression that other people are a lot
happier than we are. Social media doesn’t help here, since a lot of
people present only the highlights of their lives online. And there are
messages like “happiness is a choice” which make us think that if we’re
unhappy we must be failing somehow. After all, if we could just choose to
be happy we wouldn’t experience a lot of suffering, would we? But suffering
is a universal. It’s something we are all going to experience — not just
once in a while but every day. It’s not a sign of personal failure when
we’re unhappy, but just a sign we’re alive.
3. Recognize when you are suffering
When
people hear about suffering they often think of major things like cancer,
bereavement, or starvation. Those are weighty forms of suffering, but
fortunately they’re relatively rare in our lives. Most of our suffering
is on a smaller scale: frustration, worry, anger, disappointment,
loneliness, desire, and so on. These kinds of suffering are woven into
the fabric of our days. Overlooking that these experiences are painful
allows our suffering to run on unchecked. So when you’re frustrated,
worried, etc., acknowledge that suffering is present.
4. Turn toward suffering so that you can learn from it
It’s
natural to want to turn away from suffering, and to try to replace it
with a more pleasant experience. Sometimes this even seems to work, but
in the long term it builds up an unhelpful habit of aversion which itself
creates more suffering. Ultimately the way out of suffering is through suffering.
This means that we have to courageously turn to face painful experiences
so that we can observe them with mindfulness and equanimity. Only that
way can we learn the deeper lessons of suffering, such as, you are not your suffering.
5. Recognize that you are not your suffering
We
often experience suffering “conjoined” with it, as the Buddha put it. We
identify with our suffering, as if it’s ourselves. But experiences of
suffering are like the reflections of clouds in a lake; they’re just
passing through, and aren’t part of the lake itself. When we experience
suffering mindfully, we step back from it and observe it as a separate
phenomenon. We recognize that it’s not us. And so the suffering feels
lighter and more bearable.
6. Take the drama out of your suffering
Painful
experiences evolved as a means to motivate us to avoid potential threats,
and so they usually catch our attention very effectively. But often our
assessment is overblown and we react as if a situation is
life-threatening even when there’s no real danger. For example if we were
abandoned or ignored a lot in our childhood we may react strongly to the
merest hint of someone not responding to us. I’ve found it helps to
remember that feelings are simply a warning mechanism, and that it’s
ultimately just the firing of neurons in the nervous system. An
unpleasant feeling is not the end of the world; it’s just information
that you can choose to act on or not.
7. See how your thinking affects your feelings
A
lot of the time we just think, think, think, think, think — and the whole
time we’re making ourselves miserable. We get so caught up in our
stories, and are so convinced that our stories are true and helpful, that
we don’t recognize that we’re making ourselves suffer. Once you start
noticing how your thoughts affect how you feel, you start finding
yourself going, “Whoa! What am I doing to myself right now?” And you have
an opportunity to relate in a different way to whatever’s troubling you.
8. See how your feelings affect your thinking
Not
only do our thoughts affect how we feel, but our feelings affect how we think.
For example, when we’re anxious, we look for things to worry about. When
we find we’re in a mood we can choose to observe our unpleasant feelings
rather than let them dominate the mind. The mind actively observes,
rather than being passively pushed around.
9. Learn to reframe
When
we practice mindfulness of our suffering — those messages produced by the
mind in order to motivate us to avoid potential threats — we start to see
how we construct those messages in the first place. We have internal
“rules” about what constitutes a threat. For example, we can have a rule
that says “My partner forgetting something I’ve asked them to remember
means that they don’t care about me.” When the partner forgets, we feel
hurt or afraid, and then perhaps angry or resentful. Realizing we have
such rules allows us to rewrite them, and to reframe situations in our
lives. For example we can counter the rule above by recognizing that it
takes time to learn new habits (the partner remembering that thing) and
that people are often preoccupied and distracted, and forget things. The
new rules we create should attempt to be realistic and compassionate,
otherwise they too will end up causing us to suffer.
10. Relate compassionately to your pain
When
a friend’s unhappy you probably treat them with empathy, support,
kindness, and compassion, because these are the most appropriate response
to pain. Your suffering is just a part of you that’s in pain. Relate to
it the same way. Talk to it kindly. Look at it compassionately. Touch it (or
the place where it’s manifesting most strongly in the body) with
reassurance.
11. Observe the impermanence of your suffering
Think
about something in the past that caused you suffering but which now
doesn’t bother you. I can think, for example, of a time in my 20s when I
got into a small amount of debt and got rally anxious about it. Now,
however, I can think about it without feeling the slightest bit bothered.
The panic I experienced at that time has just gone. One of our fears
about feelings is that we’ll get stuck in them, that we’ll feel depressed
or anxious or whatever forever. But our feelings never last. As we
observe that fact over and over again it starts to sink in, and we learn
to take our feelings less seriously and not overreact to them: OK, I’m feeling sad today.
Tomorrow I’ll feel different.
12. Observe the transparency of your feelings
I’ve
said that feelings are internally generated sensations arising in the
body, and that they act as signals, warning us of potential threats. We
tend to respond to painful feelings as if they were actual threats, and
so we overreact. It’s as if every time the smoke detector went off while
you were cooking you ran out into the street in a panic, rather than
looking at the situation and realizing that it was your sizzling
veggieburger that was triggering the alarm. If we train ourselves to look
very closely at feelings of suffering, we can notice something
astonishing; there’s nothing real there. There are just twinkling
pinpoints of sensation suspended in space. They’re like holographic
projections. It’s a trick of the mind that makes them seem real, and
observing the trick closely allows us to see through it.
I
believe that when the Buddha talks about ending suffering, he’s not
talking about arranging life so that nothing bad happens to us, or even
of learning to relate to our experience so skillfully that suffering
doesn’t arise. I think he’s talking about the fact that suffering
fundamentally doesn’t exist, and that it’s an illusion created by the
mind. The mind creates suffering. The mind believes it. But the mind also
wants to be free from it. And it can be, if we just look at our
experience closely enough, with compassion and with an awareness of
impermanence.
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