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Navigating Suffering through Buddhist Wisdom and Mindfulness Practices
How to Suffer Well: Timeless Knowledge on Dealing with Hardship and Becoming Anguish-Proof (Live a Disciplined Life Book 12) By: Peter Hollins
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https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09W1NCBQX
Your capacity to handle suffering determines where you get in life. How do you want to live?
Life is tough, so you better get a helmet. Life is not a walk in the park. You'll run into pain, anguish, and obstacles. But who says that they need to affect you?
Build immunity to emotional, mental, and physical discomfort and suffering. It can be trained.
How to Suffer Well is a literal guidebook to defeating the voices in your head that tell you to give up. Instead, they'll be replaced with voices that tell you it'll be okay, this will pass, and life goes happily on.
It might sound difficult, but this is all teachable. You'll learn how to become the most zen person you know. Wouldn't it be nice to only experience the positive side of emotions?
How to tolerate the rigors of life without collapsing. Increase your mental pain tolerance to that of superhuman levels.
Peter Hollins has studied psychology and peak human performance for over a dozen years and is a bestselling author. He has worked with a multitude of individuals to unlock their potential and path towards success. His writing draws on his academic, coaching, and research experience.
Greatly expand your comfort zone and build layers of mental armor to ensure your happiness.
Guest chapter by acclaimed blogger Jason Merchey on the balm of humor to quell suffering.
Why suffering is life, but attachment is suffering
Tried and true paths to overcoming suffering
Defenses against negativity, expectations, and things outside of our control
How to live in the present, unhindered by the past or the future
How compassion and purpose assist in suffering better
Transcript
How much of your current distress is a direct result of external circumstances, and how much is fueled by your own thoughts and reactions?
Speaker:In today's episode, we'll talk about facing your suffering head-on in order to transform it.
Speaker:By mastering the art of separating pain from suffering, you can ease your burden and find peace.
Speaker:We'll dive deep into each feeling, dissecting facts from opinions to release attachments and reduce suffering forever.
Speaker:In exploring the causes of suffering, we are already beginning to sketch out some possible ways to overcome it – at least according to Buddhist tradition.
Speaker:We look to the second and third noble truth, and see that because the cause of suffering is attachment, we can let go of suffering by letting go of attachment.
Speaker:Simple, right?
Speaker:In theory, anyway!
Speaker:Finding a way to genuinely release our attachments and desires is, according to most practitioners, a life’s work.
Speaker:We are conditioned by our culture, we are shaped by our early childhood experiences, and we are all innately primed to grasp, want and cling, rather than to flow and accept reality for what it is.
Speaker:Everyone suffers, and it’s no mean feat to tackle that directly.
Speaker:Think about your life right now.
Speaker:What form does suffering take for you?
Speaker:Perhaps you are depressed or anxious, or you have relationship troubles.
Speaker:Maybe you struggle at work or with finances, maybe you have an addiction, or maybe your problems seem vast, abstract and difficult to pin down.
Speaker:Maybe the main form your suffering takes is that you’re confused about what’s wrong in the first place!
Speaker:You just know you feel bad, but you can’t say why, or identify a clear path out of the trouble.
:Distinguishing between pain and suffering
:20 00:02:22,400 --> 00:02:24,680 Let’s begin by simplifying things.
:The different shapes that suffering can take are truly endless – there might be layer upon layer of suffering, and suffering can feel like a knot made of other knots.
:How do you even begin to untie it all?
:A great first step to help you find clarity and hopefully a sense of calm is to tease apart what is pain, and what is suffering.
:The Buddhist story of “the second dart” explains this difference clearly.
:The unavoidable pains in life are called first darts – because they are like an arrow someone shoots at us.
:These hurt.
:However, the second darts are our thoughts, reactions, and responses to the first darts.
:“That’s so unfair!” It is like we shoot ourselves again, with another arrow: no longer pain, but suffering.
:If we want to start identifying our role in maintaining pain, i.e.
:suffering, we can start by noting the difference between pain and suffering.
:One way to do this is to slow everything right down, so you can look closely at the cascade of thoughts, feelings and behaviors that occur after a painful experience.
:What can happen is that, in our attempt to improve our lives, feel better or “fix” things, we focus on the second darts.
:We get carried away with the stories we tell … and only end up creating even more confusion, and second and third and fourth darts.
:Instead, it helps to just pause and look at what is actually concrete fact out there in the world, and what is happening inside us, i.e.
:what exists only as interpretation, expectation, ego or narrative.
:The next time you find yourself unhappy or suffering, stop.
:Become aware and get out a journal to help you tease things apart.
:First, just become aware of what is happening to you without judgment.
:For example, you may have just had an upsetting argument with a friend, and so you sit down with your journal.
:To do a “dump” of everything that is in your heart and mind, you write down the following:
:42 00:04:22,760 --> 00:04:23,640 I feel really angry
:I don’t know if I want to be his friend anymore
:He thinks he’s so much smarter than everyone, and I’m sick of it
:I thought we were friends
:Why is this happening?
:What have I done for him to start acting like this?
:He told me I’m an idiot, but I think he’s an idiot
:50 00:04:38,960 --> 00:04:41,520 And on and on.
:Without trying to judge or interpret, you just write down what is in your heart and mind.
:Then, when you feel you’ve captured the gist of it, stop and take a look at what you’ve written.
:Now, draw two columns on a piece of paper, one labelled “first darts” and the other “second darts.”
:55 00:04:57,680 --> 00:05:04,840 Spend the next ten or twenty minutes deciding which column to place each of your thoughts, feelings and beliefs.
:This may take some care.
:You want to identify which part of your experience is a simple fact of life, part of reality and an unavoidable truth, and which part is coming from you – i.e.
:your attachment.
:It may be easier at first to simply imagine you are sifting through “fact” versus “opinion.” Imagine a completely neutral third party was writing a bland news article about the situation – what would they say was pure fact?
:For example, let’s take the statement, “He’s wrong to play the victim when he’s the one who’s being a bully.” This may be a sincerely held feeling, but in truth, it’s not an objective part of reality.
:Rather, it’s a belief and interpretation that comes from your perspective.
:It’s definitely a second dart!
:Likewise, “he’s an idiot” is an opinion whereas, “he told me I’m an idiot” is plain fact.
:“He shouldn’t have said that” is a second dart – and likely something that is causing more suffering than the pain of the first dart.
:Sometimes, certain statements of thought and feeling hint at deeper underlying expectations.
:For example, “I thought we were friends” suggests a deeper expectation, i.e.
:“we used to be friends, and I was expecting that we would always be friends.” Again, this is a second dart.
:It is our desire for an outcome for the situation, rather than the situation itself.
:If you look at the above list, it may start to become clear just how little is fact, or a first dart.
:If you remove expectation, interpretation and attachment, you might be left with very little indeed: “My friend and I argued, he called me an idiot, and we may not continue to be friends.” It may take you some time to pick apart situations in this way, at least at first.
:Often, things get confusing because we mix up facts and opinions.
:But though it takes time, it’s worth un-mixing these things and just looking at what is on one side, and what our reaction is on the other side.
:Once you do this, you will start to gain a certain clarity.
:When you feel like you’ve thoroughly dissected the situation, ask yourself the following questions:
:76 00:07:14,080 --> 00:07:17,280 What is the reality of my situation right now?
:What are the facts?
:In what ways am I adding second darts to the situation?
:In this situation, what is pain and what is suffering?
:What can I control here, and what is out of my control?
:What beliefs, expectations, and interpretations are extending or adding to the pain right now?
:Here’s another, simpler example.
:You notice you have a headache and feel miserable.
:You stop and ask, what is pain, and what is suffering?
:You realize that your head literally hurts right now, but that your mind is also filled with a whole slew of thoughts along the lines of, “this couldn’t have come at a worse time, I’m so busy today!” and “I had too much coffee, that’ll serve me right.
:I really have to fix up my lifestyle” or “I wonder if it’s brain cancer…”
:88 00:08:06,000 --> 00:08:13,800 By simply doing this, you separate out what is pain and what is suffering, what is under your control and what isn’t.
:Then, you give yourself the option to choose.
:You can take a painkiller or sit somewhere quietly while you wait for the inevitable pain of the headache to pass – which it will.
:And maybe, since it’s entirely unnecessary, you decide not to get carried away with self-talk about the headache, which only makes things worse.
:You have a headache, you accept that you do… and somehow, the problem is much, much smaller.
:Knowing how to discern between fact and opinion, or between first and second darts, won’t make all your problems disappear.
:But it will stop you from making them bigger than they have to be, or holding onto them long after they have naturally moved on.
:Once again, our featured book was How to Suffer Well.
:In this book, Peter Hans explores the profound wisdom that suffering is an inevitable part of life, but how we respond to it can shape our resilience and personal growth.
:By distinguishing between pain and suffering, understanding the nature of attachment, and cultivating a disciplined awareness, we can transform hardship into a source of strength and clarity.
:I leave you with this quote from William James.
:The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
