Live Session Summary, Sunday, June 12, 2022: Good to see everyone! The theme of today’s session was letting go of suffering and cultivating happiness. I spoke of how the central question for the Buddha was, ‘Is there an end to suffering in this human life?’ This was the search that he embarked on when he left his life of comfort and luxury and entered the homeless life. He found an end to suffering and shared his teachings for 45 years.
All the Buddha’s teachings revolve around suffering. He said, ‘I teach one thing: suffering and its end.’ His first and central teaching—around which all his other teachings revolve—was the ‘four noble truths’: the existence of suffering, the cause of suffering—craving/clinging, the end of suffering, and the path to the end of suffering.
Dukkha, in the Pali language, is most often translated as suffering. A better translation may be ‘unsatisfactoriness’ or ‘dissatisfaction—the feeling that things are not the way we want them to be. The derivation of the word dukkha, according to meditation teacher Gil Fronsdal, is ‘du’, meaning ‘bad’, and ‘kha’, meaning the hub of a wheel. So, we might think of dukkha as a wheel out-of-kilter.
In the Buddha’s teachings, suffering is not a thing but rather a relationship—an unskillful relationship with our experience or with what is happening. When we suffer, there is something we are doing to create or perpetuate our suffering. When we see our own involvement in our suffering, we are then in a position to let go of clinging, which leads to freedom.
We have the capacity, then, to untangle ourselves from suffering by meeting our experience whole-heartedly, with acceptance and without judgment. We transform our experience by how we meet it. A difficult situation—for example, receiving a serious health diagnosis—will be experienced very differently if we react to it with aversion, fear, or catastrophizing than if we meet it with self-compassion, understanding, and equanimity. How we meet our experience makes all the difference in the world.
We explored dukkha—in the talk and meditation—as the second ‘characteristic of existence’—the others are impermanence/change (anicca) and non-self or absence of a permanent ‘self’ (anatta). When we meet our experience—whatever is present—by reflecting that ‘this is unreliable; this cannot provide lasting satisfaction,’ we have the possibility of letting go of clinging and experiencing greater freedom. The invitation is to simply notice if reflecting on this truth that nothing can be clung to leads to greater ease and well-being.
I shared William Blake’s poem ‘Eternity’; John O’Donohue’s poem ‘Fluent’: ‘I would love to live // Like a river flows, // Carried by the surprise // Of its own unfolding’; and the last lines of Mary Oliver’s poem ‘The Summer Day.’ Have a good week and I’ll see you next Sunday from County Mayo, Ireland, at 9am eastern. Warmly, Hugh 🙏🏼 🌻
