Dancing With Life: Buddhist Insights for Finding Meaning and Joy in the Face of Suffering

Oftentimes, the First Noble Truth is misquoted as “All life is suffering,” but that is an inaccurate and misleading reflection of the Buddha’s insight. He did not teach that life is constant misery, nor that you should expect to feel pain and unhappiness at all times. Rather, he proclaimed that suffering is an unavoidable reality of ordinary human existence that is to be known and responded to wisely.

When you are overcome with resentment and aversion to suffering, your resistance is indeed an affliction. When you feel ashamed, depressed, and defeated by your suffering, it presses you down, causes you to contract. But if you can learn to separate your resistance to suffering from the actual pains and difficulties in your life, an incredible transformation takes place. You are able to meet your suffering as though you were a wagon receiving the load being placed on it. Paradoxically, the effect is that your load is lightened, and your life can roll forward, whatever its destination.

A deep acceptance of life “just as it is” allows you to be more fully present in your life moment by moment, no matter how difficult or how sweet it is, and it empowers you to act more from your deepest values. Regardless of the circumstances of your life at any given time, your experience is richer, more alive.

It is a teaching in how to live wisely.

You may discover that what you are doing in the name of feeling good is a way to distract yourself from a strong emotion that you are reluctant to be with.

In Buddhist psychology identifying with and clinging to desire are said to result in your “taking birth.” In other words, you have created an illusory self whose happiness and well-being depend on getting what it wants.

Second InsightThis Noble Truth must be penetrated to by fully understanding suffering ...Third InsightThis Noble Truth has been penetrated to by fully understanding suffering ...SECOND NOBLE TRUTHWhat is the Noble Truth of the Origin of Suffering?Fourth InsightIt is craving ... accompanied by relish and lust, relishing this and that ...craving for sensual desires, craving for

to life’s inherent stress around getting and keeping what you like and avoiding or enduring what you don’t like can you know suffering in a manner that will ultimately free you from its grip. The Buddha referred to this state when the mind is no longer consumed by suffering as nibbana. The pains of life do not disappear

relinquishing, leaving, and renouncing of it....

FIRST NOBLE TRUTHWhat is the Noble Truth of Suffering? Birth is suffering, aging is suffering, and death is suffering. Disassociation from the loved is suffering, not to get what one wants is suffering ...First InsightThere is this Noble Truth of Suffering: Such was the vision, insight, wisdom, knowing, and light that arose in me about things not heard before.