The Three Sufferings: The Two Ordinary Sufferings of Pain and Change
Throughout his long ensuing career as a teacher, when the Buddha was being efficient, instead of teaching his Four Noble Truths, he would explain simply, “I teach suffering and the end of suffering.”
We have just considered how, at the beginning of Prince Siddhārtha’s quest to resolve the problem of suffering, he renounced his sheltered life of luxury to subject his body to intense distress under the model and method of asceticism. He poured on the pain in order to will his way to the end of suffering. This initial method depended on philosophical dualism: the separation of the governing entity mind from the supposedly subservient body.
You may rightly wonder whether Siddhārtha’s confusion in initially grasping at that polarizing means of transcendence also contained some kernel of truth. Apparently, after all, the Buddha had from the beginning of his journey already discerned some difference between pain and suffering. As we set out to define some key Buddhist doctrines and theories, this difference is worth contemplating.
In the language of early Buddhism, Pāli, the term usually translated to English as suffering is dukkha (Skt. duhkha). The translation is imperfect, as translations tend to be. In addition to suffering, dukkha is variously translated to English as stress, unease, dissatisfaction, and unsatisfactoriness. But an especially interesting translation in this context is reactivity.
Although suffering, stress, unease, dissatisfaction, and unsatisfactoriness all connote an outright negative affective state, reaction is tone-neutral. This observation is worth examining from within the doctrine of the Three Sufferings and, ultimately, the doctrine of the Three Poisons.
Because the word react is not explicitly negative, you can gain understanding by engaging in a thought experiment: Imagine a scene in which you are reacting to a nighttime roller-coaster ride with either joy or fear, either pleasure or pain. The initial experience, as well as the memory of the attending joy or fear, then generates a future craving or aversion toward roller-coaster rides in general.
Continuing the thought experiment, notice that, when you are thereafter prevented from boarding a ride that you desire, then your desire will likely be experienced as an annoyance resembling an itch, which is negative. If, on the other hand, you are pressured into a ride that you fear, then you will suffer the straightforwardly negative affective state fear—as well as a desire for a future state beyond the current ride’s end.
Beginning in human infancy, such linkages of memories and anticipations pattern themselves into a what Western psychologists term the self-image. By means of a continuous process of your identification with it, this memory-trace-constructed patterning becomes objectified into your identity. The identity in this way becomes an enduring self-structure—not merely a fleeting experience of a specific emotion.
Whether the predominant “flavor” of the reaction is attraction or aversion, we can see from this thought experiment how the root of the term dukkha is reactivity itself. Whatever feeling-tone first arises, it is not in itself dukkha. Dukkha is the subsequent reaction to that feeling. It is the identification with wanting to be rid of that present feeling-tone. This distinction between feeling and reactivity to feeling is crucial to skillful practice, as well as to a right understanding of what awakening does and does not accomplish.
Buddhist doctrine elucidates three forms of suffering: Two forms are grouped under the category Ordinary Suffering, and one is called Fundamental or All-Pervasive Suffering. Division into these two categories helps us understand and detect the subtle aversion hidden in pleasure. It also helps distinguish Fundamental Suffering, which is addressed by Ordinary Special Insight practices, the first of two levels of insight practice.
Here, we consider the two Ordinary Sufferings.
The Suffering of Pain
The ordinary Suffering of Pain, also known as the Suffering of Suffering, is straightforward unpleasantness owing to the perils of our being mortal. The list of these perils from the Middle Length Discourses, Sammāditthi Sutta, is as follows:
Birth
Sickness
Old age
Death
Lamentation
Pain
Grief
Despair
Being human, you are all too familiar with this form of suffering. It requires no explanation. Nevertheless, insight can be gained if you use naturally pain-filled opportunities to investigate your experience for the difference between pain and suffering. Acute physical pain is the simplest kind of ordinary suffering to work with in this way.
Superadded Suffering
In my own life I have taken deep tissue massages as opportunities to explore pain. If you have ever had a deep tissue massage, then you know that, on the way to releasing pain, the massage “discovers” it where you did not previously suspect that it existed, which is interesting in itself.
When my massage therapist first presses into my piriformis muscle, the result is what we refer to as toe-curling pain. As in meditation, when I meet with physical pain in daily life, I “stay with” it instead of compulsively fight it. Then, with curiosity, I feel for the difference between straightforward physical pain, on the one hand, and for aversive reaction to that pain, which is suffering, on the other hand.
By “staying with” pain, I mean that I rest into not only the pain point, but also into the whole surrounding world and whole “inner” world. Simply and naturally breaking into and out of the pain point and its radial surroundings, I “let it rip” however it will. “Resting” is a matter of not merely courageously bearing with the whole of my experience, including pain, but also fully relaxing into it.
Resting into pain is somewhat advanced practice, so understand that initially practitioners must resolve to bear with it. “Resting into” will come later. Bearing with pain means resolutely practicing nonavoidance of it so as to notice the suffering of it without necessarily seeing that suffering dissolve in the short term. This initial kind of nonavoidance practice requires courage, but in time and with continued practice it will become the resting into kind.
A more dramatic and seemingly contradictory example of resting into physical pain comes from the time when my sports doctor administered a steroid injection deep into my injured knee. The needle for this procedure is thick and long, inflicting sharp pain in the tender innards beneath the kneecap. The injected solution itself spreads cold-burning pain during, as well as after, the procedure. In short, the pain arising from the procedure is sufficiently intense to trigger an involuntary full-body jerk and shudder, as well as temporary loss of vision to “seeing stars.”
Before I received this injection, my doctor sat on a stool lower than the examination table on which I sat with my foot on a step-stool below the table. My knee was bent ninety degrees and held stationary between the doctor’s two knees. Apparently, he knew that I was about to jerk and shudder, so he had to hold my knee still for me.
As he began injecting the steroid, I happened to be staring down at his visually busy necktie. It was nearly Christmas, and the tie was covered with rows of ridiculously repetitious images of Christmas trees. The absurdity of his tie struck me as funny just as pain was ripping through me and blotting out my sight with “stars.” I offered no resistance to the simultaneous whole-body shuddering, nor could I have.
Because I resisted neither the pain, nor my nervous system’s need to shudder in response to it, I did not suffer. The pain in this event was not merely “held in equanimity,” as meditators with some early level of opening often say, but was experienced directly as intense energy interlaced with bliss. The involuntary shuddering and “stars” discharged all the excess energy from my nervous system, and I went happily about my day and life.
Resting into physical pain this way is immediately fruitful because previously having many times noticed the difference between pain, on the one hand, and the psychoemotional suffering of it, on the other hand, automatically prevents much of the total negativity. After all, in situations of acute physical pain, the primary layer of unpleasantness is purely affective: It is anxiety or fear, the feeling that no less than survival is being threatened.
In your daily life, you can search relevant experiences for a “boundary,” or exact distinction, between incoming physical pain and the outflowing suffering that resists it. I encourage you to begin this potent practice now and continue it for the duration of your path. Aside from relieving you from much ordinary negativity surrounding physical pain, will prove a handy experiential reference when you begin to work with other forms of pain and suffering during formal insight practices.
In A. H. Almaas’s works interfacing psychology and spiritual awakening, he names the outcome of staying with somatic experience basic trust. In addition to off-cushion practice with physical pain, formal preliminary practices help you experience and, over time, stabilize basic trust. With these formal practices, you cast a container of support and safety within which to stay with otherwise destabilizing or suppressed patterns of suffering. Continuing these practices deepens confidence, which you is one of the Five Spiritual Faculties supporting successive levels of awakening through balanced practice.
Undischarged Shock Trauma
Interestingly, wild animals are more resilient than we domesticated human animals are to trauma. Why is this so? To begin to answer this question, we first observe that human beings have a triune brain, meaning a brain with three basic parts:
The inmost structure is the reptilian brainstem and cerebellum.
The second structure above and outside the cerebellum is the mammalian limbic system.
The highest structure is the mammalian neocortex.
Although the following classification scheme oversimplifies the organ, each of these “three brains” correlates to a set of responses, from the evolutionarily most primitive to the most abstract:
The cerebellum correlates with instinctual responses aimed at physical survival.
The limbic system correlates with responses aimed at emotional and social well-being.
The neocortex correlates with high-order abstract thinking, reasoning, and learning.
Although all mammals have some neocortex, primates’ neocortex is large. The human neocortex, in particular, is impressive in size, comprising 80 percent of overall brain volume, meaning that we come into the world “packaged” with a significant complex-thinking bias.
To continue with this inquiry comparing humans’ and other animals’ survival responses, we note that the primitive cerebellum, which is the inmost brain, automatically reacts to environmental threats in one of three ways:
Fight. The animal aggressively counterattacks the threat.
Flight. The animal attempts to escape the threat by fleeing the scene.
Freeze. The animal automatically stops all outward action and, in essence, buys time by “playing dead.”
In Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (1997), Peter A. Levine, the pioneer of the evidence-based somatic experiencing therapy, analyzes why human beings suffer from trauma disorders while wild animals do not. He begins with an illustration comparing the way that humans react to threat with the way that an impala reacts under attack by a cheetah.
Ordinarily, the impala would react with flight, because the impala is under no delusion that it ever plays the role of a predator that could successfully fight. In the illustration presented in Waking the Tiger, the cheetah catches up with the impala, however, so the impala automatically collapses—freezes. The freezing response is an automatic, not deliberated, altered state in the face of an overwhelming threat. Levine explains that, despite the apparent immobility of the impala, tremendous energy is coursing through its stock still body:
From the outside, [the impala] is motionless and appears to be dead, but inside, its nervous system is still supercharged at seventy miles an hour. Though it has come to a dead stop, what is now taking place inside the impala’s body is similar to what occurs in your car if you floor the accelerator and stomp on the brake simultaneously. The difference between the inner racing of the nervous system (engine) and the outer immobility (brake) of the body creates a forceful turbulence inside the body similar to a tornado. (p. 20)
Levine concludes that the “tornado” is the point out of which trauma forms unless its tremendous energy can be discharged from the body.
The impala’s involuntary freeze response may be an evolutionarily second-best “strategy” to fleeing, because the cheetah may drag the seemingly dead impala to a place safe from other predators, or to a place where it shares prey with its cubs. There, the impala may have a second chance to flee. If the impala does successfully escape during an opportune moment, Levine notes, then it will seek safer ground, lie down, and literally shake the altered state off. Once the shaking has discharged the tremendous internalized energy from the body, the impala will hop up and skip off back into its impala life (p. 20).
By contrast, human beings’ large neocortex enabled toolmaking for both defense and predation. Unlike the impala, the human being is not unambiguously either prey or predator. Consequently, a human being’s response to threat is not completely automatic. The neocortex, which enables the human to abstract survival threat even to psychosocial situations, such as an employer’s disapproval, also freezes the human before otherwise instinctual response options.
In other words, our uniquely human power to deliberate and adapt can confuse us when we face a perceived urgent threat. This confusion functionally “freezes” us in place, immobilizing us. But unlike the impala, the human being does not as a rule discharge the internalized energy of terror:
Animals in the wild instinctively discharge all their compressed energy and seldom develop adverse symptoms. We humans are not as adept in this arena. When we are unable to liberate these powerful forces, we become victims of trauma. In our often-unsuccessful attempts to discharge these energies, we may become fixated on them. . . . [We] may spend months or even years talking about [our] experiences, reliving them, . . . but without passing through the primitive “immobility responses” and releasing the residual energy. . . . (Levine, 1997, pp. 20-21)
The human being seeks to resolve the embodied trauma by means of neocortex processes, perhaps through talk therapy. The client with post-traumatic stress disorder already suffers from overt traumatic repetition in the form of intrusive memories, nightmares, and hyper-vigilance. Talk therapy, as well as other efforts to resolve the somatic symptoms with the conceptualizing mind, risks continually re-traumatizing the sufferer.
Levine innovated somatic experiencing therapy to help clients with post-traumatic stress disorder work directly with “stuck” feelings to release them from the body.
The always more-or-less traumatized human being’s situation as Levine presents it informs Buddhist meditation, because meditation is designed not only to liberate the thinking mind, but also to repair its split from the body. In fact, the liberation of mind requires direct exploration and release of polarity otherwise held in the body unconsciously.
As the Buddha’s story shows, his first teaching about the cause of suffering points primarily to a dualistic split between body and mind, dualism. In Buddhist theory of the self, dualism is not our nature, but instead is the beginning of all human complications. The sequestering of mind from body also opposes both to the world. Notably in this regard, we recall that the Buddha awakened completely only after he abandoned subjugation of the body to the cultivated rigors of asceticism.
Human beings—because of the complexity represented by the three brains—have been confused by traumatic memory “since beginningless time.” What does this standard Buddhist phrase “since beginningless time” mean? Well, it captures the notion that conscious human beings entered history by inventing the state-change incrementalization that we call time. In entering history by buying into psychological time, humanity forgot that portion of its nature that is free of time.
Since the time that our Homo sapien ancestors developed a neocortex “third” brain capable of abstract cognitions, our experience departed dramatically from that of the rest of the beings on this planet. Specifically, because of our capacity to perceive (invent) time, we are the only species that contextualizes any particular perceived threat—whether physical or emotional—with sure knowledge of the ultimate threat, which is that our bodies will someday die.
This overshadowing threat of mortality motivates our basic distrust of the here-and-now. To defend against this abiding sense of our annihilation, we invest our prolific memory chains with a feeling of identity. This identity is a projected self “structure” in that we believe it somehow remains stable along the axis of time.
The rest of the Animal Kingdom meantime experiences no such split between the mind and the body. By entering history and psychological time, we humans began carrying forward not only our individual trauma, but also the trauma of the familial, ethnic, regional, and national lineages to which we belong. Unlike the other beings with whom we share Earth, every embodied now that we live is preconditioned by our past patterning of memory into identity. This patterning spreads itself across time and space genetically, epigenetically, and culturally.
So we are born into confusion by means of compulsive traumatic repetition. For example, we try to work out past trauma through new present associations. More often than not, though, these associations give rise only to old neurotic relationship patterns, because compulsion works through ignorance of ourselves.
Our true nature is open, undivided, limitless, and spontaneously aware. But as we preemptively fail to recognize that unconditioned nature of our being, we fail to recognize otherwise ever-present clarity itself. In other words, we fail to simply be clarity cognizing itself.
Instead, from our inherited supposed “beginning,” our self-clinging reactivity to a threatening world continues to obscure our nature. That obscuration guarantees more self-defensive reactivity based on and productive of additional traumatic repetition, with which we continually unconsciously identify.
The mind-boggling fact is that we think that our internal posture of self-clinging self-defense is the way to escape traumatic repetition, to deliver ourselves to safety. But precisely the opposite is true.
Not knowing our true nature as the edgeless, centerless, undivided, open ocean of clear awareness that it is, we fixate on and thereby fuse with its obscuring surface debris. This debris can be any particularized percept mentally carved out from the whole: body, others, memories, hopes, and so on. In unconscious reactive fusion with these particulars, we continuously compound our fundamental ignorance of ourselves and the world. This foregone conclusion is known as conditioning.
Willing Self-Sacrifice
How do we begin to resolve this state of affairs? First, to build capacity to stay with the whole of whatever present experience is arising—to at least bear with it, no matter how painful—we must, through diligent daily meditation practice, still our attention from bouncing from debris pile to debris pile, from object to object. But even before that practice begins, we must raise sufficient basic trust within which to practice such methods.
Although the neocortex “stores” and rolls out our habitual thinking-feeling responses to any recognized category of raw feeling, these responses are, as we have been considering here, a superadded layer of reactivity. These responses, in their very attempt to bypass impersonal raw pain, compound it into personal suffering. Indeed, taking pain personally is the Suffering of Pain.
The way that we begin to clear oceanic wholeness of obscuring debris is to directly feel our present pain without making something of it. That is, without grasping at and fusing with some other thing, person, memory, or hope to escape it. We can willingly enter into the vulnerability that this extent of presence requires, even though we may currently doubt that feeling our feelings leads us out of suffering from them.
What helps us willingly enter into this vulnerability? Cultivating courage by regularly studying and contemplating Buddhist theory helps. Study of theory, in helping us recognize the sacred, is what the Greeks distinguished as theoria, a deep listening to and contemplation of the teachings. As theoria, doctrine and theory converge with praxis. So in the Dharma we take refuge.
Dharma also reminds us that many practitioners have gone before us, healed trauma, and optimized for sustainable happiness and altruism through these time-tested understandings of suffering and application of pragmatic solutions. From exemplary lineages of such practitioners, we draw support and confidence. We take refuge in their example to fortify our own courage and perseverance, and we then set our strong intentions for the current practice session. Refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the assembly of all practitioners is accomplished by specific body-based and imaginal practices.
With the confidence, courage, resolve, and softness of self-compassion cultivated by these preliminaries, we can begin to settle compulsive, escapist “attention bounce” by practicing calm-staying. With physical and mental pliancy thereby developed over time, we can begin, through insight practices, to notice that our apparently bounded entitihood is actually open to the field. We can begin to recognize that experience vis-à-vis the world is neither out there nor in here, but radically undivided in being only relational.
One of my teachers, John Churchill, teaches students that the word sacrifice derives from the same root as sacred (sacr-). When the right convergence of compassion and suffering is understood, then so is the blessing that John issued whenever I would report to him a broken heart. The blessing goes like this: “May your heart break open even wider.” This blessing probably sounds more like a curse. But it is indeed a blessing, for the word blessing means transformation, and wishing for breaking radically transforms the word breaking, as well as its apparent opposite, wishing.
More discursively, physician Gabor Maté writes in his book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, “Being cut off from our own natural self-compassion is one of the greatest impairments we can suffer.” In other words, “Along with our ability to feel our own pain go our best hopes for healing, dignity and love” (2010, Kindle Location 5411).
Eventually, you see, we get the point: that the spiritual path is mere fantasy insofar as it represents escape from life’s troubles. Churchill and Maté are pointing out what the Buddha learned: that it is willingness to be vulnerability, entered into willingly, that powers the earnest path to cessation of suffering.
For the seeker who was Prince Siddhārtha, others’ suffering gave rise to his compassion, but it was a form of compassion that was fused with the helplessness of its objects and therefore gave rise to his own suffering. Still, he entered the path and persevered. Even his asceticism—although a misunderstanding—was at least a willingness to feel his own pain, and that kind of bravery leads eventually to self-compassion.
When the Buddha broke his fast on the morning of his enlightenment, he marked the transformation of his cultivated form compassion for others to ultimate compassion, ultimate being synonymous with the end of his suffering. This transcendent compassion was the end of suffering insofar as it was the end of seeking an illusory loophole through which to escape his own pain.
Pain avoidance is, after all, the supreme suffering, as we will learn in detail in the third of the Three Sufferings: Fundamental Suffering, which is headed “Conditioning.” Here we are considering that perseverance in seeking an end to suffering requires the calling up of brute-force courage to feel our own pain, including emotional pain such as shame, guilt, and fear. Treading this path earnestly requires many such leaps of confidence, many such heroic inculcations of self-sacrifice.
The Suffering of Pain, whether by physical or emotional shock, is classified as ordinary, as opposed to fundamental, because being born into a human body makes us automatically heir to serial painful shocks. Without awakening from our compulsion to deny pain, we live a life in which acute physical pain can result in immobility, and immobility can become suffering perpetuated as trauma.
Whether the more natural alternative is my shuddering involuntarily from a steroid injection, or the impala’s instinctual shaking off energy after a terrified collapse, we human beings can choose to stay with whatever is unfolding. By maintaining a motivational perspective of nonavoidance and nonresistance, we shed unnecessary layers of suffering so that we can in turn uncover more primitive layers of ordinary pain. In this way, all suffering can be, with time, worked with and released.
The Suffering of Change
The Suffering of Change, like the Suffering of Pain, is ordinary human suffering, but noticing it is a far subtler affair and best conveyed by example.
So imagine that you have a big chocolate cake topped with dark chocolate-bourbon ganache. It is your favorite dessert and you are hungry, so you cut yourself a generous wedge and start eating it. Although the taste is initially delightfully rich and sweet, when you are two-thirds through your portion, your stomach begins to feel bloated.
Vague queasiness sets in. The sweetness becomes cloying. You push the rest away and now desire water, or even salt—anything with which to contrast these sensory consequences of your initial hunger for sweet chocolate cake. Such is the Suffering of Change.
Now imagine that it is a hot Fourth of July holiday. You desire to go swimming in an ice-cold sinkhole in, say, some backwoods in North Florida. You jump into an aquamarine icy depth and experience refreshing relief from the intense heat of July.
But after you swim for about half an hour, you begin trembling, and your lips turn blue from the freezing water. The sun from which you sought relief is now your most pressing desire. You climb out of the sinkhole and lie in the sun to warm yourself, basking in the pleasure until the heat again drives you toward relief. Such is the Suffering of Change.
In both of these examples, objects ordinarily denoted as pleasures change to sources of pain as the experience of them continues.
When I first began my daily meditation practice many years ago, I did so in part because I was seeking a way to soothe symptoms of anxiety. But more prominent than even this forthright anxiety as a motivator for practice was a dawning sense that I had, for the previous decade, flitted from friend to friend, hobby to hobby, pleasure to pleasure. Each person and occupation had been initially pleasant and certainly seemed inherently so, yet none satisfied me long.
The flitting among pleasures became more prominent as a repeated pattern than the individual pleasures that the pattern subsumed. My noticing the pattern was the beginning of insight. I was no longer unconsciously fused with the Suffering of Change, but instead was coming into recognition of its previously elusive root. I came to suspect that the root of my continuous pleasure-seeking was subtle aversion.
As my first mentor, Daniel M. Ingram, taught me, boredom is subtle aversion, meaning that boredom is aversion to noticing our own otherwise straightforward aversion. In this sense, boredom is a whole extra level of suffering based in ignorance, in the sense of ignoring. When unconsciously fusing with a pleasure, I was fixing my attention on it. Fixation on a novel pleasure loses the broader metacognitive awareness that makes possible our tracking of moment-by-moment change.
The resulting supersubtle suffering that we call boredom then arises, motivating more restless novelty-seeking after ostensible pleasures. Boredom likely feeds most persons’ novelty-seeking, including subconscious cultivation of interpersonal “drama,” which is at least stimulating. Boredom, or restlessness, is always a sign of fixation-hunger, which depends on our ignoring the suffering born of change. Seeing the pattern as such begins to restore metacognition, which is key to successful insight practice.
Investigated meditatively with sufficient depth and frequency, my background restlessness was recognized as the generalized anxiety I initially differentiated from my pleasure-seeking. The differentiation was confusion—ignorance about my own mind and motives, and about the way that desire and suffering are bound together. I had to recognize and acknowledge that I was suffering even as I was drawn in toward fresh pleasures. My recognition of the intertwining of attraction, aversion, and ignorance was the earliest insight that consistently motivated my path.
My adult son calls the way of life in the postmodern West “degenerate, hedonistic, and materialistic.” He is not wrong. We are habitually oriented outward, toward an environment that we can continually critique, manipulate, and consume. In the chapters that introduce Extraordinary Special Insight meditation practice, you will learn in detail about the field as the meditator’s event perspective. In those chapters what I mean, in part, by our event perspective is this orientation to the “outer” world of sense objects.
As a culture we are already experts at the event perspective, so much so that we little realize that it is even a perspective, in contrast with some other possible perspective. Habitually turning our seeing, hearing, feeling, and running commentary outward, we ignore what inside us sustains this need for a carousel of pleasures.
I am not advocating asceticism or suggesting that we should not seek anything or enjoy events. The point is to notice the arc along which your desire shifts to satiety, and your satiety shifts to suffering. The point is that motivation is slippery and seemingly compulsive because no particular content satisfies.
Practice: From Satiety to Seeking
Here are some practices that focus on how desire for novelty arises from impermanence of satisfaction:
Spend some time at work, at school, or in social settings, quietly noticing how pervasive your companions’ orientation toward outer conditions is. How quickly and often do they abandon one comfortable outlet or condition for a different one? Journal your observations quantitatively and qualitatively.
Beginning in a comfortable state, note whenever new pleasure “content” motivates a transition in your activity, position, or posture. When and why did the first state convert to a motivation for a difference state? Can you discern the moment that aversion drove that need for change? Journal your observations.
Eat a rich or filling plate of food slowly. Observe as precisely as possible when hunger or pleasure in the food changes to satiety. Keep eating and observe as precisely as possible when satiety changes to overt displeasure. Where in your body are the sensations of displeasure? Does your abdomen feel different? Does the food have the same taste, or does it now taste different than it did when you were hungry? Is taste inherent in food? Journal your observations and insights.
What do your observations tell you about the inherency, or lack of inherency, of comfort and discomfort in any particular object, state, or condition?
Practice: From Change to Adaptation
Rather than emphasizing the desire for change because the pleasure of an initial state becomes aversive, this next set of practices emphasizes change itself as a kind of suffering:
Take a hot bath or shower. End it with a cool-to-cold rinsing, and observe how reaction to the cold develops. Is your reaction to it an inherent physical reflex to all situations of coldness? Is pain inherent in the cool or cold water? Alternatively, is your reaction psychological? Is it both reflex and psychoemotional, and, if so, can you find where your psychological attitude or expectation ends and your physical reflex begins? What happens if you stay in the cool shower for several minutes? Does your aversion reduce? Do you experience the same temperature the same way in the winter as you do in the summer? You may need to repeat on successive days to study what the aversive reaction involves and whether you can avoid any extent of it by taking a different psychological attitude. Journal all your observations and insights.
Next time that you are relaxing or enjoying an activity and need to transition to some work or a different scene, notice whether the transition involves any suffering. For example, when you transition from listening to a favorite album to working on a paper or project from work, notice whether the transition comes with any inner resistance or tension. Notice whether that tension continues or dissipates as you enter into the flow of the new activity or new scene. Is the new activity or scene inherently unpleasant or pleasant? Why do you think that transition often comes with some difficulty? Journal your observations and contemplations.
When you are either playing a musical instrument or beginning aerobic exercise, observe the warm-up period and the transition past it. Tune in to where in your body the sensations of difficulty or effort arise during the warm-up. Can you pinpoint the moment when difficulty changes to flow? What do you think may account psychologically for the relative suffering during the transition period? Do you think the difficulty or pleasure is inherent in your physiology during transition? Does motivating the transition with a positive or heroic attitude change the experience? If so, why? Journal your observations, questions, and contemplations.
Conclude your reading about the Three Sufferings with the third one, Fundamental Suffering, which is based on the conditioning of the human attentional system.
Welcome! I’m Jenny. Back in 1982, at the age of 19, I began studying Eastern philosophy and doctrine. In the late 1990s, I authored a 400-page doctoral dissertation comparing Zen koan aporias to the deconstructive rhetoric of silence in modern American texts—an East-West interface that still informs my teaching and writings today.
2010 marked the beginning of my formal Buddhist meditation practice. After engaging Theravadin practices in late 2013, Stream Entry quickly happened in August 2014. Mahamudra Fourth Yoga stabilized in July 2015. I then began practicing within the Bon Dzogchen tradition and began writing content now informing The Critical Path to Awakening (forthcoming). In 2017, I founded Axis Mundi Awakening to offer an intensive whole-path Buddhist awakening program to select, highly motivated students. Interested to learn more? See my teaching approach and curriculum overview.