the antidote to suffering

The Antidote to suffering by Louise Taylor January 2024

​A question I get asked a lot is: why did I start meditating?

And the short answer is, because I was in pain. When I first came to practice in my late 20’s the pain, emotional and psychological was intense, through practice this pain has greatly reduced and there is greater wisdom over how and why this pain arises. To be honest, it’s no exaggeration to say that meditation practice and the dharma has literally saved my life.

The buddha taught that there are 3 characteristics of all things that come into existence. In the Pali language they are Dukkha, Annica and Anatta, translating as suffering, impermanence and no-inherent-self. These three characteristics are intimately interwoven creating the fabric of all that exists, but it is dukkha, our suffering, that we viscerally feel. It is, without wisdom, our unseen driver, propelling us on, unknowingly creating more and more suffering. This suffering was what buddha sought to be liberated from and what is at the centre of all his teachings. It is what the four noble truths are about. In the suttas he states, “I teach one thing, dukkha and its cessation”.

Dukkha encompasses many things and has no simple pali-english translation, although most often it is translated as suffering. For me in my late 20’s this suffering was obvious, I was experiencing a high amount of emotional and psychological pain which had arisen out of causes and conditions from childhood. Those experiences, those initial conditions and causes set in motion habitual patterns as my being sought to survive and to solve the problem of the pain. As I grew into adulthood these patterns continued to strengthen and I was continually seeking relief from the inner pain. Not everyone is living with such conditions (thankfully) so dukkha may be more subtle, but it is there. It may be in the form of stress, anxiety, agitation, fears, tension, avoidance, addiction, sadness and sorrow, regret, grief, anger, resentment, contempt, our relationship and resist4ence to physical ailments/illness, fatigue, rumination, old age, resistance, desire, attraction, craving, overindulgence, depression, restrictive behaviour, tiredness, excitement, fogginess, intoxication…. You get the idea.

In fact, even when we become very quiet in the heart/mind and our body is relaxed and our attention is resting in present moment experience we find that just to be alive has a subtle tone of stress/unpleasantness. Each inhale is initiated in response to rising CO2 levels and falls in O2, and a small delay in allowing the inhale will create a greater sense of urgency and unpleasant sensation in the body. There are aches and pains moving around the physical form and even when a comfy position is accomplished, it is only a matter of minutes before the body wants to move again. Then there’s feelings of needs to eliminate and feelings of hunger and thirst to name but a few experiences of dukkha in the moment to moment experience of the body at rest.

But dukkha isn’t just the experience of pain or unease or satisfactoriness it is the identification we ascribe to the initial phenomena and the relationship we then have with it. Here we see the 2 arrows, the initial pain/discomfort/unease is one and the ensuing entanglement with identification, conceptual thinking and relationship in action, the second.

As an example, let’s say the emotion sadness arises, but not because of an immediate obvious incident, it just arises in the heart. Often, the most common reason that an emotion arises is just from habit, emotions habitually arise and this in turn, conditions them to further habitually arise.

However, without awareness, the habitual nature often goes unnoticed and the mind begins to generate a narrative that mirrors the emotion. It may well be a narrative that is familiar, and we engage and identify with the story/memory/narrative and believe that this narrative is, in fact, the reason there is sadness. We may already have strong identification with the emotion, mulling over what happened to ME, who did what to ME, what I wish I’d done instead, questioning such as ‘why am I having these thoughts again I thought I was over this’, ‘why can’t I let go of this’, etc” and in doing so we identify with the sadness, the sadness is mine, I am sad. All this is reinforcing the sadness, prolonging it and feeding it.

The mind, when faced with the entanglement of the identification with the sadness (I am sad) and the engagement/fusing with the narrative that is playing (the perceived cause of the sadness) goes about trying to solve that problem and invariably, after a certain amount of rumination, comes up with a solution. This is what the critical thinking mind does, it solves problems, except these kinds of problems are not its forte because they are based on false premises, i.e., identification with and the idea that there is a problem and that that problem is about what you’re thinking and that the said problem needs fixing. So, whatever the mind comes up with as a solution, it inadvertently keeps the sadness in place, because not only are we identified now as being sad, we now believe we are sad because of the narrative and we can’t relieve the sadness until the prescribed solution is administered. Through this process we will have also added other feelings and emotions to the situation as part of our relationship to the narrative, some anger perhaps, or resentment, some judgement, maybe some disappointment or self-pity and then there is now this solidifying of self and situation and a striving for the solution.

And this is a great irony of the human condition. Without thorough investigation and insight into our inner landscape we live in a world of proliferating perception that is essentially mistaken and, not only creates more of the very suffering it aims to reduce, it is the suffering it aims to reduce.
We become addicted to the minds preoccupation with trying to solidify the way things are (including our perceptions of ourselves and each other) and lost in the push and pull of attraction and aversion to our own perception of experience. This is what the Buddha describes as the root cause of our dukkha, having mistakenly created a perception of the way things are (delusion) we develop craving/clinging for things to be different which creates action to grasp that which we are subsequently attracted to (greed/infatuation) and push away what we have aversion to (hatred/hostility).

But there is good news because by firstly acknowledging that we experience dukkha in our lives and reflecting that current and past strategies to alleviate that suffering haven’t really worked we can start to wake up to how our clinging is the cause of our suffering and in doing so we begin to see that a way out is possible.

This then is the template for the four noble truths laid down by the Buddha from the very beginning of his insight and liberation.

1 there is suffering
2 there is a root cause of suffering (craving/clinging).
3 there is cessation to our suffering.
4 there is a path towards the end of suffering (the eightfold noble path)

Over and over in the suttas the Buddha instructs us to ‘know’ suffering, to embrace it and become intimate with it, to fully understand it. Once we do, we see that it is our internal clinging for things to be different that is the root cause of our suffering and no amount of outward manipulation will bring relief. The dharma teaches us that to cling is to suffer and the consequences of our clinging through thought, speech and action creates more suffering. Once we see that our clinging creates suffering we can begin to let go and notice what happens. The noticing is important because we are learning a new way of relating to the worldly winds that whip around us and through this process of letting go with awareness, we will at some point notice a sweet moment of cessation. Throughout our lives we experience many moments of cessation but without mindfulness we don’t notice. We don’t notice because the mind is subsequently quiet, there’s no suffering and therefore there’s no narrative playing, and the mind isn’t seeking a solution. This pleasant state often goes unnoticed and the quality of it and the insight into it is lost on us. Only when something arises in the heart mind that stimulates the mind back into craving do we notice that and often we can then be tricked into thinking that this is the constant situation. So, the third noble truth asks us to fully experience cessation, to be aware in the present moment with mindfulness to enjoy, notice and be present to this subtle sublime quality of cessation of craving. This is a wonderful turning point, one where we consciously choose to stop craving because we see into the truth of suffering. From this incredible vantage point a lifelong path opens, a new way of life to continue the letting go of and stopping craving. Deep inner work that transforms our experience of life. This is the noble eight-fold path, the wheel of dharma that through practice keeps turning in our lives.
 
Vipassana directly translates into insight or ‘special seeing’. The first noble truth asks us to ‘know’ dukkha and subsequently see into its root and experience its cessation. But how do we do this? Because this is the kind of knowledge that can’t be gleaned from reading a book or listening to a talk. These modes of communication can gain our attention, they can intrigue and alert us, they can, perhaps most importantly inspire us but the insight the Buddha is asking us to cultivate happens in a different way, it happens through mediation.

Meditation allows us to look, with fresh eyes, on what is really going on. At first, as we cultivate this beautiful quality of mindfulness, this open, receptive, curious lens of present moment awareness, we can be quite taken aback at the messy content and sensations in the heart/mind and body. But with perseverance we begin to experience the transformative potential of practising mindfulness meditation. Through this cultivation of mindfulness and concentration we remove tainted lens after tainted lens until we achieve, what Rob Burbea, in his wonderful book of the same name calls ‘the seeing that frees’.

Practicing vipassana mediation is the key to developing insight, the key to freedom from suffering. It is through meditation that the Buddha attained his freedom and it is the practice of meditation that the Buddha repeatedly instructs us to do.

He urges us to not take his word for it, to not follow blindly what others say, regardless of their position in society, confidence, followers or attainments in tradition. But instead he urges us to ‘know it for ourselves’.

This is what mediation does, it gives clear insight into our internal process, into the truth of how and why things arise as they do. It gives freedom from fixed beliefs about self, others and the world around us. It illuminates a path on which to travel, a path that with each step reduces dukkha.
That’s the real jewel of this practice and the gift that the early Buddhist instructions give us. To be a light unto ourselves, to find the path through this practice of insight, a whole body, heart and mind experiential process of present moment awareness.

As the great Buddhist monk Ajahn Char notes:
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“The mind of one who practises doesn't run away anywhere, it stays right there. Good, evil, happiness and unhappiness, right and wrong arise, and he knows them all. The meditator simply knows them, they don't enter his mind. That is, he has no clinging. He is simply the experiencer.”