Visit https://dharmalicious.substack.com to join the newsletter and receive Paul's additional content.
When we settle back and look at our minds, it’s not too difficult to recognise that our thoughts, behaviours, and actions are primed to move us away from pain and towards comfort.
Even if sometimes our thoughts, behaviours, and actions are clumsy and maladaptive and end up entangling us in ever stickier webs of suffering, the motivation behind them – the core intention – is to get us back to some form of happy as swiftly as possible.
You could say that each of us, in our own way, is obsessed with happiness. Or at the very least, with not suffering.
It consumes us. It’s been consuming us since the lights of human consciousness were switched on.
Which makes it even more perplexing that in most cultures - particularly western, capitalist cultures - that true happiness is the thing we understand the least.
The most potent misunderstanding we have about happiness is that we’re not supposed to suffer.
We’re not supposed to feel discomfort.
We’re not supposed to get sick.
We’re not supposed to feel icky emotions.
We’re not supposed to be vulnerable to having everything change on us in an instant.
We have a deeply rooted sense that suffering is wrong. Or worse, there’s something wrong with us when we suffer.
So, our instinct is to dive in and try to fix or banish every kind of wrinkle, crease, twinge, or niggle in our lives.
Our conditioning has us believing that it’s only through an absence of suffering that we can be truly happy.
Now, the obvious question is:
How’s that working out for us?
Understanding Dukkha
The Buddha understood that true happiness, peace, and contentment—within ourselves and with the world—is achievable. But only when we see the truth about what it means to be born into a human body with a human mind; the truth that we cannot avoid the inevitability of unwanted and unpleasant experience.
There’s no getting away from it. Unwanted and unpleasant experience is the non-negotiable admission fee for taking part in humanity.
So, if we want to be truly happy in life we’ve got to work out how to skilfully navigate and relate to our suffering. And that can only start by getting a handle on why and how we suffer in the first place.
The first teaching the Buddha ever gave was that of The Four Noble Truths, which remains steadfastly at the core of all Buddhist philosophy and practice.
The first of these truths is the Truth of Dukkha.
Dukkha is an ancient Pali word (Pali being the language the original Buddhists texts) and is often translated as ‘suffering’.
But, like many Pali words, there is no single English equivalent word that can capture the true breadth and depth of its meaning.
You may have heard that the Buddha said, ‘Life is suffering’, but that’s not a particularly helpful or accurate translation. Afterall, life can also be extremely joyful.
It’s more accurate to say, ‘In life there is suffering’. But even then, each of us have different ideas of what constitutes suffering in our own experience.
Dukkha is better understood to mean a kind of ‘unsatisfactoryness’, or ‘a bumpy ride’, or ‘that which is difficult to be with’, or ‘that which is hard to endure’.
And in terms of what it’s referring to, it covers the full range of unpleasant and unwanted human experience, from intense physical and emotional pain and mental anguish to mild frustrations or things just seeming “a little off” or “not quite right”.
When we frame it that way, it’s a lot easier to see that, yes, on any given day we inevitably bump up against and array of events, thoughts, and emotions we’d rather be without.
Think about when you wake up in the morning. How long does it take for the first moment of Dukkha to arrive?
For many, it might be before the eyes have even opened.
A heart-sinking resistance to it being morning already.
Not wanting to leave the comfort of the pillow.
Thoughts about the busyness or challenges that lay ahead.
And that’s before even placing a foot on the floor.
And then, of course, there’s the bigger stuff.
The interruptions, the bad news, the disagreements, the setbacks, the losses, the betrayals, the illnesses, the injuries, the bereavements, the accidents.
It’s all Dukkha.
And none of us are exempt.
Accepting that Dukkha – or suffering – is a natural, normal, to-be-expected, and unavoidable part of life, is the essential first step on the Buddha’s path towards cultivating a more peaceful and happier mind.
Or as the wonderful Buddhist nun and teacher, Pema Chödrön, said,
“The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we suffer, it doesn’t mean anything is wrong. What a relief!”
So rather than turning away from our suffering, trying to resist it, avoid it, or paper over it, the wisest move we can make is to get to know it—to investigate it, to understand it.
The Suffering Of Suffering
One of the things I really appreciate about the Buddha is how he laid it all out so clearly, including categorising the 3 types of suffering that each of us inevitably experience.
The first category is called The Suffering of Suffering (or, in Pali, ‘Dukkha Dukkha’, which is fun to say).
This describes the fact that we live in a world where there are many things going on around us, or that we may even get embroiled in, that are incredibly difficult to be with.
Things like violence, hatred, cruelty, abuse, poverty, sickness, pandemics, homelessness, racism, sexism, all the ‘isms’, natural disasters, climate catastrophes, the list goes on.
There is no reframe to convince us that any of this is good. It’s not, it’s hard. And to a large extent it’s the backdrop to our lives.
The route to peace is not to deny that any of this is real, but rather to examine our options for how we might relate to it.
Also included within The Suffering of Suffering—which is sometimes known as ‘Ordinary Suffering’—are the difficult emotions that none of us are impervious to.
If you have a human body and a human mind at some point you are going to experience anger, resentment, sadness, sorrow, grief, embarrassment, guilt, fear, anxiety, stress, nervousness. Again, the list goes on.
We don’t feel any of these emotions because there’s something wrong with us. We feel them because they are baked into the fabric of what it means to be human.
And then there are all the difficult or uncomfortable physical sensations we experience.
We get tired, we get hungry, we get aches and pains, cuts and bruises, we get sick.
Just think about temperature. How often is it just right versus it being too warm or too cold?
It’s all Dukkha.
The Suffering of Change
The second category is The Suffering of Change (Viparanama Dukkha)
One of the core conditions of life that we find most difficult to bear is that everything changes and nothing is permanent.
We’re conditioned to based much of our happiness and satisfaction on things being a particular way. We chase after the conditions and the things we want, and when we get them, we want them to remain and stay the same.
We crave certainty, predictability and stability. And, of course, this is a problem when we live in a universe that is characterised by change and impermanence. Life itself is not stable. It’s uncertain and unpredictable. It’s in constant flux.
The Buddha said,
“Whatever is of the nature to arise, will also pass away.”
As a simple example, think about what it’s like buying a new item of clothing that you really, really like. Two ways we feel the effects of change is
1) the level of happiness you feel towards that garment is going to fade, it’ll become old news quite quickly, and
2) The garment itself will fade—it’ll wear out, get tattered, and might end up as rags.
The Suffering of Change describes the suffering we feel when we pin our satisfaction on things that, by their nature, cannot stay the same and cannot last.
They are inherently unsatisfying.
The Suffering of Existence
The third category of suffering is The Suffering of Existence (Sankhara Dhukka). Often referred to as ‘all pervasive suffering’.
This is about the basic experience of what it’s like to be a human being, and the deeply held, though erroneous, sense that we each have these inherent and fixed identities that are separate to the inherent and fixed identities of everyone else.
While this gives us a sense of being special and unique in the world, it inevitably comes with its own subtle sense of isolation, accompanied with the not-so-subtle weight of responsibility to keep ourselves happy and alive.
All pervasive suffering is born out of the fact that we want ourselves to remain stable and unchanging.
If only we could wave a magic wand and stay forever young, beautiful, vibrant, and healthy.
But the reality is, every one of us faces the same circumstance. We’re born, we grow and, if we’re lucky, we get to grow old. At some point the body inevitably gets weaker and wears out, we get sick, and, eventually, we all arrive at the same end.
None of us are exempt.
And that is incredibly hard for us to come to terms with. It’s the thing we find hardest to fully accept. We don’t like thinking about it. We’ll often do anything to avoid thinking about it. But we’re all too aware of our finitude, and with that comes an existential low-level hum of anxiety that lingers in the background.
So, we do what we can to hold back the tide, to keep ourselves younger for longer, to stay fit, avoid getting sick, to distract ourselves from the whole ‘passage of time’ conundrum.
This isn’t to say we shouldn’t be doing what we can to keep ourselves healthy. Of course, it’s really important that we do.
But when the behaviours we engage in are born out of a subtle act of rebellion against the precariousness of life, then they create their own kind of suffering, because ultimately, they never work. We’ll always find ourselves back at the second category: The suffering of change and impermanence.
Now if you’ve made it this far, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that this all sounds rather pessimistic.
But remember, the Buddha’s teachings really are laid out to provide a path for peace.
The intention of exploring these categories—
The Suffering of Suffering
The Suffering of Change
The Suffering of Existence
—is, if we want to be truly and genuinely happy in life—to transcend our suffering—then we first must investigate and understand how suffering shows up for us in the first place.
It’s by seeing the truth of Dukkha clearly in this way that we’re then ready to recognise and appreciate that the contentment we seek is not being held ransom by the realities of life, but by our deeply conditioned tendency to get caught up in being attached to our lives having to be a particular way.
This leads us neatly on to the 2nd Noble Truth – The truth of the Cause of Dukkha
Which—spoiler alert—is Craving.
This is a topic for another day, so please look out for that.
Warmest,
Paul 🙏
Get full access to dharma⌁licious at
dharmalicious.substack.com/subscribe
