the insistence on suffering. it is a concept i don’t understand in myself as much as i don’t understand it in others. no, i understand it in my self even less. for others i give benefit of doubt, i know i dont know everything, and i have compassion. but i expect my self to not suffer unnecessarily, to know better, to be able to switch views, and to be able to “practice what i preach.” in a sense it is a desire to be better than myself (and by implication, others). it is an expectation that i should be above “it.” i don’t know if the “it” is my human limitations, maybe i want to transcend my body and my natural instincts, maybe i want to be one with things despite the fact that i strongly feel a sense of separation, or pain, or suffering.
in On Not Being Stingy, writes:
We also try to turn a profit in practice—to get something from it. We try to get better. We try to get enlightenment. We try to get seen for doing it right. What are we being stingy with here? Wholehearted surrender to the present moment or to what is. Think how stingy we are with that. Think how tightly we hold on. We also imagine that in practicing, what we will “get” will be ours—which is, of course, the greatest delusion of all.
And then there is surrender. In addition to treating it as a bargaining tool—“I’ll surrender to the present moment and then get something back”—we imagine that surrender is something we can do… Bargaining is something stingy people do all the time: “I’ll do this if you do that”; “I’ll do this in order to get that.”
even in the search for peace, there is a sense of if i practice then i will not suffer anymore. this paradigm is difficult to re-frame. it is hard to accept that there will be suffering/discomfort in our lives no matter what. i’m not sure if this is due to promises of quick fixes in advertising combined with how easy it is for us to buy these fixes: move, switch jobs, switch partners… these promises and possibilities keep the hope alive that there is a solution out there and i have not found it yet. life starts being about finding this panacea or relief. i suspect, and have learned, that much of our suffering is caused by rebooting so many times, of not finishing the programs and commitments, of being so preoccupied and paranoid with making sure we get what we need. Pema Chodron says that suffering occurs when we are unwilling and unable to accept the present moment. i guess it includes when we are unwilling to work with what we have in the present moment. how much does the frantic efforts to jump out of our lives, of always wondering if things could be better, of always assuming the grass is greener somewhere else, keep us from actually finding the goodness or at least the real-ness of the present moment?
in the book When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron said:
Life’s work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into your life wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will. It’s going to stick around until you learn your lesson, at any rate. You can leave your marriage, you can quit your job, you can only go where people are going to praise you, you can manipulate your world until you’re blue in the face to try to make it always smooth, but the same old demons will always come up until finally you have learned your lesson, the lesson they came to teach you. Then those same demons will appear as friendly, warmhearted companions on the path.
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