Hi everyone, it’s Judi Cohen, and this is Wake Up Call 445. Let’s go to basics and talk about suffering.
“Suffering” is a word I’m starting to hear in the vernacular, in the way I remember starting to hear the word “mindfulness” in the vernacular maybe a decade ago. Hearing the word mindfulness surprised me and also delighted me, and I feel the same way about suffering. How strange is that?
But maybe not so strange. In the ancient mindfulness texts, the Buddha said, “I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering.” Twenty-six hundred years later, that’s still the practice: here we are, trying to understand what suffering really is, and how it ends.
I’ll talk about what suffering is in the next Wake Up Calls but today I want to talk about what I understand as the “end” of suffering. I want to talk about that first because there can be a pretty big misunderstanding about it. And the misunderstanding usually goes something along the lines of, if we practice mindfulness, our lives will be entirely pleasant and we’ll never be unhappy. And that is the end of suffering.
Sometimes I meet someone who has that understanding and even has that as a goal: to have an entirely pleasant, never-unhappy, life. They’ve maybe committed to never getting angry. Or they see sadness as more of an “opportunity” to find the pot of gold at the end of sorrow. Or they believe they need nothing and sometimes, no one, and are therefore living their lives free from desire.
This is pervasive in our legal community just like everywhere else. A few years ago I was working with one of our teacher training students who was putting together a talk for their law firm. And they said they weren’t going to talk about suffering because no one was suffering at the firm. Billable hours requirements were low, pay was good, there were no internal squabbles. There were no screamers. No one was getting divorced. Everyone was good. Another way of misunderstanding the end of suffering: being high up on Maslow’s hierarchy that there isn’t any more suffering.
But in the many conference rooms and classrooms I’ve been in, teaching mindfulness, whenever I ask people to raise their hands if they’ve never been angry, or never had a sad moment with no redeeming qualities, no possible good ending, or never lusted for the next shiny thing, everyone laughs, and no one raises their hand.
No one has no difficulties. No one has no suffering. And since that’s the case, it can’t be the case that the end of suffering is having no difficulties, having no suffering, because there are people who would say they have reached, or at least glimpsed, or had moments of, the end of suffering.
So then what is the end of suffering? It’s the end of wanting things to be other than they are.
It’s the end of believing that if only…anything. If only I were wealthier, younger, older, healthier, taller, shorter, smarter, more attractive, more resilient, even more mindful, even more compassionate or self-compassionate, then I’d be happy, and my happiness would be durable and something I could count on. It’s the end of all that. All the great teachers have said it much more simply: it’s letting go.
Letting go of…wanting things to be other than they are.
The genius of mindfulness is in seeing that the state of wanting things to be other than they are and never being able to let go into whatever is actually happening, is what causes suffering. And that, amazingly – and this is why we meditate - we have agency right here, in this moment, to relax, let go of all the wanting and wishing, and end suffering by simply being with what is.
I’m getting over or maybe still in the middle of a bad cold or a flu or possibly Covid although my tests were all negative. I started feeling sick on Saturday, got really sick Sunday, was a mess Monday, couch-bound Tuesday, and yesterday, finally up and about a little. And also during all those days, because this was all planned months ago, I had to fly to Portland on Friday, help my daughter make some really tough decisions on Saturday, help her pack her house all day Sunday, help her load the car and drive (as a barely conscious passenger) from Portland to Lake Tahoe on Monday.
Here’s what I noticed about the end of suffering. I was mighty sick. So I thought, why not use my practice? I’m not doing anything else (other than all the things). Why not use mindfulness to track suffering and the end of suffering?
Here’s what I discovered. In the moments when I was feeling sorry for myself, I was suffering. The virus was bad, but the feeling-sorry-for-myself, made it worse. I was putting a hat on top of a hat. I was making a virus that was a 10 out of 10, into a moment that also contained a 10 of feeling sorry for myself…and the whole moment therefore became either a 20, or a 100, depending on whether the add-on emotion, over which, once I notice it, I had some agency over, was an add-on or a multiplier. When I let go of feeling sorry for myself and just swigged another two Tylenol with my cough syrup, there was a moment of, ok, this is just how it is.
Same thing when I was worried my girl would get the virus. The worry was also a ten, or maybe an eight or nine. Adding that to my 10-virus made for a lot more suffering; letting go of the worry, kept the situation at a 10. (She got it anyway – such a bummer – and it was a good reminder to me of how useless worry is on all the other levels as well.)
So there it is. The 10-virus: nothing I could do about that (other than Tylenol & cough syrup). It was just happening. When I forgot that, which happened plenty, and the level 10 poor-me thoughts, or the level 8 or 9 worry thoughts, started marching through my mind, there I was, wanting things not to be the way they were. When I remembered that, which truth be told happened somewhat less frequently – essentially when I could be mindful of that - there was still all the discomfort and grossness and terrible things about being so sick. But there was an end to suffering.
As our old friend Pema Chodron says, “no more struggle.” That’s my understanding, anyway, of the end of suffering.
Let’s sit.
