B DEEP PRACTICE OF SUFFRING

Trying to avoid what’s unpleasant seems to be deeply ingrained in the human psyche. After all, when life feels out of sync we naturally seek comfort and relief. But the feeling that life is out of sync is hardly new. As Buddha pointed out more than 2,500 years ago, we’ll always have to deal with the fact that life entails discomfort and disappointment. We will always have our many problems—concerns about financial security, relationship difficulties, fears about our health, anxious striving toward success and acceptance, and so on. Yet, perhaps the most basic problem is that we don’t really want to have any problems; perhaps that’s what, in part, makes our current time seem so full of distress.

Sometimes, when emotions are particularly intense, when we feel the very uncomfortable feelings of groundlessness and helplessness, it is especially difficult to remember what we know. And there’s a good reason for this. When we’re distressed, the “new” or conceptual brain tends to stop working. This is called “cognitive shock,” which turns off the cognitive mind’s basic ability to function. When the thinking brain is on sabbatical, we simply can’t think clearly. During cognitive shock, the “old” brain, which is based on survival and defense, takes over. At this point we’re likely to attack, withdraw or go numb, none of which are conducive to awareness. To be honest, when caught in cognitive shock, we’re fortunate if we can even remember that we want to be awake.

Can I Let This Experience Just Be?

This is not easy to do, because our human compulsion toward comfort drives us to want to fix or get rid of our unpleasant experiences. To allow our experience to just be usually becomes possible only after we’ve become disappointed by the futility of trying to fix ourselves (and others). We have to realize that trying to change or let go of the feelings we don’t want to feel simply doesn’t work. Allowing our experience to just be requires a critical understanding: that it’s more painful to try to push away our own pain than it is to feel it. This understanding is not intellectual but something that eventually takes root in the core of our being.

Once we can really let our experience be as it is, awareness becomes a more spacious container, within which distress begins to dismantle on its own. Sometimes it helps to widen the container of awareness by intentionally including the awareness of air and sounds, or whatever we can connect with outside the skin boundary. Within this wider and more spacious container, the distress may even transform from something heavy and somber into pure, nondescript energy, which is more porous and light. The energy may then release on its own, without any need to try to get rid of it.

This final question—Can I let this experience just be?—also allows the quality of mercy or loving-kindness to come forth, because we’re no longer judging ourselves or our experience as defective. We’re finally willing to experience our life within the spaciousness of the heart, rather than through the self-limiting judgments of the mind.

These five questions—What is going on right now? Can I welcome this as my path? What is my most believed thought? What is this? Can I let this experience just be?—remind us of the key steps needed to work with our emotional distress. Some students carry little laminated cards with the five questions in their pockets for times when “cognitive shock” takes hold, when everything we know is temporarily forgotten.

Remember though, these questions are just pointers; it’s important not to get lost in the technique. In the bigger picture, we ask these questions because when we have emotional distress, we are usually caught in our own self-imposed prison walls—of anger, fear, and confusion. But when our self-imposed prison walls come down, all that remains is the connectedness that we are.

ANGRY ANGRY SAD SAD ANXTY ANXTY FEAR FEAR 

DISAPPTD DISAPPTD 

CALM CALM 

JUST BE JUST 

DD DD