Quotes About Suffering

We commit to doing all it takes to free ourselves completely from all our varieties of confusion and unconscious habit and suffering, because these prevent us from being fully there for others. In the language of Buddhism, our ultimate commitment is to attain "enlightenment." In essence, this means knowing fully who we really are.

Whether the reality of change is a source of freedom for us or a source of horrific anxiety makes a significant difference. Do the days of our lives add up to further suffering or to increased capacity for joy? That's an important question.

addictions stem from this moment when we meet our edge and we just can't stand it.

What a predicament! We seem doomed to suffer simply because we have a deep-seated fear of how things really are. Our attempts to find lasting pleasure, lasting security, are at odds with the fact that we're part of a dynamic system in which everything and everyone is in process.

When I realize I'm triggered, I think of it as a neutral moment, a moment in time, a moment of truth that can go either way. What I'm advocating is that in that precious moment we start to make choices that lead to happiness and freedom rather than choices that lead to unnecessary suffering and the obscuration of our intelligence, our warmth, our capacity to remain open and present with the natural movement of life.

In reality, whatever arises in our experience is neither good nor bad, right nor wrong. Yet we spend so much energy and suffer so much because we believe in all these concepts.

Our story lines are different, but when it comes to pain and pleasure and our reaction to them, people everywhere are the same.

There comes a time when we are able to be pierced to the heart by our own suffering and the suffering of others, and by our own regrets, without it dragging us down. We can hold the sadness of life in our hearts while never forgetting the beauty of the world, and the goodness of being alive.

learned that a person can only take so much. He found that taking on suffering had to be balanced with love and kindness, with the completeness of life.

When we feel lonely, when we feel hopeless, what we want to do is to move to the right or the left. We don't want to sit and feel what we feel. We don't want to go through the detox. Yet the middle way encourages us to do just that. It encourages us to awaken the bravery that exists in everyone without exception, including you and me.

Even if you were the Buddha himself, if you were a fully enlightened person, you would experience death, illness, aging, and sorrow at losing what you love. All of these things would happen to you. If you got burned or cut, it would hurt.

We suffer... because of three tragic misunderstandings. First, we expect that what is always in the process of change should be graspable and predictable... Second, we proceed as if we are separate from everything else, as if we are a fixed identity, when our true situation is egoless... Third, we look for happiness in all the wrong places. The Buddha called this habit "mistaking suffering for happiness.

As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don't deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.

that way of looking at things is what keeps us miserable. Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly.

Obsessing about getting what you want and avoiding what you don't want does not result in happiness.

The Buddhist explanation

The basic thing is to realize that we have everything going for us. We don't have extreme pain that's inescapable. We don't have total pleasure that lulls us into ignorance. When we start feeling depressed, it's helpful to reflect on that. Maybe this is a good time to read the newspapers a lot and remember how terrifying life can be.

The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering, it doesn't mean that something is wrong. What a relief. Finally somebody told the truth.

We also change like the weather. We ebb and flow like the tides, we wax and wane like the moon. We fail to see that like the weather, we are fluid, not solid. And so we suffer.

We can be with what's happening and not dissociate. Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.

That sticky feeling is shenpa.

be free of suffering and the root of suffering.

strengthening habitual patterns of suffering. We begin to see this more and more clearly, and we begin to realize that we can do something different.

When something hurts in life, we don't usually think of it as our path or as the source of wisdom. In fact, we think that the reason we're on the path is to get rid of this painful feeling.