We use pleasant and unpleasant feelings to measure our success or failure. If we experience something pleasant, we think we’ve succeeded. If we experience an unpleasant feeling, we think we’ve failed.

When our minds cling to the nature of experience in a personalized way, we end up running around trying to prop up a sense of a satisfied happy self, or reinventing ourselves as miserable and hopeless.

The practice is to look at things from the lens of our experience and seeing their impermanent, uncertain, changing nature…. they’re arising, they’re ceasing, they’re arising, they’re ceasing.

Ajahn Pasanno , On Becoming and Stopping