Freedom From Stress

This is the third talk on the teachings of the Four Noble Truths. The third noble truth involves the cessation, the stopping of suffering, of pain. In Pali, the word that is translated to cessation is Nirodha which more literally means without the obstacle. So the absence of obstacles; this is good news.

Transcript

I'd like to start this third teaching of the Four Noble Truths.

I'd like to start it by reading an excerpt from this poem by Dorothy Hunt again,

Because it's exactly what the Third Noble Truth is about.

Peace is this moment without judgment,

That is all.

This moment in the heart space where everything that is,

Is welcome.

Peace is this moment without thinking that it should be some other way,

That you should feel some other thing,

That your life should unfold according to your plans.

Peace is this moment without judgment,

This moment in the heart space where everything that is,

Is welcome.

This is the essence of the Third Noble Truth that we're looking at today.

So we're halfway through.

You know,

In the past couple of weeks,

We've come to know a little bit better these happenings,

These truths in our own hearts and minds.

We've come to know a little better the flavor of our pain,

Our stress,

And how we're holding on to it,

The ways in which we hold on to it.

The teacher Ram Dass,

Who died in 2019,

Was such a beautiful being and teacher.

And he wrote that suffering,

The first of the four,

Suffering is grace.

It is part of the process of life itself.

And when we know this,

It gives us the ability to stay open to the pain.

Peace is this moment without judgment.

So this Third Noble Truth involves cessation,

The stopping of pain,

Of suffering.

And in the Pali language,

The language of the Buddha,

The word that is translated to cessation is nirodha,

Which literally means without obstacles.

So the absence of obstacles.

Okay,

This is the good news.

And the most common obstacle to pain.

So if suffering,

As Ram Dass has said,

Is grace,

And it's part of life itself.

And the most common obstacle to that pain generally is aversion.

We don't want to feel discomfort and the uneasiness of being alive.

You know,

Anything can happen at any time.

And that can be very scary and uncomfortable for people to meet.

And so we guard ourselves in all kinds of ways.

You know,

We avoid activities.

Maybe we even avoid relationships,

Because if we are in relationship,

We don't want to experience being vulnerable.

And we can curate our lives in ways that we experience is very reliable.

You know,

If you know that you're going to be going to the gym on Tuesdays and Thursdays,

There's this sense that you're safe as long as you have that on the calendar.

So you know,

This control is kind of like an obstacle to it's an illusion.

No obstacles in a sense means that there's no obstacles to feeling the pain that is part of this life.

I've always loved how Jack Kornfield shares about this living experience.

He describes it as the 10,

000 joys and the 10,

000 sorrows.

And we all are not exempt from this.

It's all of us.

There is pain in this life.

This is the first of the four.

And the cause,

The second is how we hold on,

How we brace ourselves against it.

There's probably some compulsion,

Something that we can't really stop.

You know,

There's a compulsion to figure out how to not feel the pain of this life.

And that's represented in this word craving.

The second noble truth is that there is this craving,

This clinging to what we want and what we don't want.

And craving has a phenomenal role in how we suffer.

It's an obstacle,

Right?

You know,

Wanting it to be different is a craving.

Not wanting what we have,

Pushing it away,

That's an obstacle.

And so this third noble truth is about freedom from obstacles.

And it has so much to do with how we're relating to the pain that life is presenting.

So much to do with how we're relating to the pain of what life is presenting.

So usually something unexpected happens.

And we have a strong reactivity to it,

Unless we've trained our minds.

And the reactivity can be like a searching or a chasing,

A reaching out,

You know,

For something different or pushing away.

It's an obstacle,

Our reactivity.

And it can be fully emotional as well.

Or another way of working with emotions is it can be stuffed down so deeply that it's a way that we guard ourselves against emotions,

Against feeling.

All kinds of ways we have to work with the suffering that is inevitable in this world,

The pain that is inevitable.

So what we're doing in this practice is we're training the mind through meditation.

We learn about the mind and we certainly see how the compulsion to think and to plan and to ruminate just starts to happen as soon as we still the body and quiet the body.

So with mindfulness,

We begin to see,

You know,

In this moment,

Where am I clinging?

What is the mind ruminating on?

And if we can train the mind just a little bit,

We can remember to come back.

Remember that what is occurring will disappear.

It's subject to change.

It's always changing.

And maybe we can get back to the moment.

And maybe we can even ask when we get back to the moment,

Is there anything wrong in this moment?

Is there anything wrong in this moment?

In this moment,

Right here and now,

Is there anything wrong?

A lot of our suffering and our clinging can disappear when we stop all the constructive interpreting aspects of the mind.

We put them down and they're quieted for a time.

Cessation doesn't necessarily mean permanent stopping.

I think that's important to remember,

Like never to return.

But it does mean to discontinue,

Even for a while.

There is suffering and if we don't get involved,

It can be like,

Look at that,

Wow.

Maybe it's not like watching clouds go through the sky at first,

You know,

Just a natural phenomena that's happening.

But look at that and not getting involved with the reactivity.

It does require some effort.

Effort is one of the path factors that is mentioned more times than any other factor in the suttas,

Effort.

When we apply effort in the same way that we apply mindfulness,

It's not a big effort.

It's just a simple turning towards it.

It's very easy just to see enough,

See,

Oh,

Where am I clinging?

I mean,

I sometimes say to myself when I see a not wanting or the arising of the clinging of this contraction,

That is the pain of this life.

And when I can have a presence of mind,

What occurs is this arising will also pass.

This happening will also pass away.

And that can be enough mindfulness to unhook from the grips of the craving that it be otherwise.

It's pretty phenomenal to experience this because it then informs a different relationship to our inner life.

One which we don't have to judge this moment or be critical or reactive.

Peace is this moment without judgment.

When we see difficulty,

Suffering,

Pain arise and the wanting it to be different,

The clinging to it being different,

And we don't engage with it,

We're not involved,

We just see it and we breathe and we return,

Peace is this moment without judgment.

So then Nirodha,

The cessation of suffering,

There's no obstacle there.

There's just a really deep clarity of mind,

Seeing the arising and the passing of things clearly that we don't get involved with pleasure and pain and discomfort.

We're able to see these things without any obstruction and without getting entangled.

This is one of the goals of practice.

This is one of the ways in which we're able to cut the clinging and the grasping.

And the path,

The path,

The how to do this is coming up,

But we'll spend a little bit more time on this together.

So thank you for your kind attention for this reflection this morning.