Now a well-instructed person, when touched with a feeling of pain, does not sorrow, grieve, or lament, does not beat his breast of become distraught. So he feels one pain: physical, but not mental. Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and, right afterward, did not shoot him with another one, so that he would feel the pain of only one arrow. In the same way, when touched with a feeling of pain, the well-instructed person does not sorrow, grieve, or lament, does not beat his breast or become distraught. He feels one pain: physical, but not mental
The Buddha, The Sallatha Sutta
It is hard to stick just with the direct experience of life – to “actually be where we are”, as Jon Kabat Zinn advises in this morning’s quote. This is especially the case in moments of difficulty and doubt. And we do not have to go looking for these: If we just wait around, life will bring us enough moments to challenge us. These can give rise to difficult emotions of greater or lesser intensity, such as sadness, anger, fear, feeling lost or a sense of deficiency. For as long as we are alive we will encounter such moments. Therefore, one of the most useful skills we can develop are ones to work with such events and the subsequent emotions. The Buddha’s teaching, quoted above, is a useful strategy to practice. He distinguishes between the difficulties or pain we naturally feel in life, and the pain or suffering that we shape ourselves. For example, someone may say something that hits a sensitive part of our life, or we may be late for a meeting because of traffic or even fall ill by picking up some virus that is doing the rounds. However, we may then increase our suffering by the way we add on or the way the experience gives rise to negative thoughts about ourselves or how our life is going. In other words, the hassle or the pain is natural, but we create suffering by how we perceive the event and the physical sensations, how we judge them, and how we respond to them.
When something difficult happens to us, we have a tendency to commence a whole bunch of mental processes that can lead to more difficulties and create suffering — often thus adding more pain than there was originally. We find it hard to simply be with what is happening, of being in a gentle relationship with it. Instead, we don’t like it, and want to push it away by finding fault in ourselves or others, blaming, judging, and generally feeling sorry for ourselves. We are trying to develop the skill to be able to open up to these strong emotions without either letting them discharge themselves in blame or self-pity, or running away from them or distracting ourselves from them as is easy in today’s society. In doing this we just try to let the moment be, without adding. Because life is complex we will encounter many situations in which elements are not ours to control, or in which things happen without malicious intention. Paradoxically, sometimes it is right and appropriate just to be sad.
