How Can We Meet Suffering?

The Buddha is often quoted as saying that he taught "suffering and the end of suffering." But what does this mean? This is a dharma talk that describes my own experience of suffering due to an accident, and what I learned about the many ways we can practice with the wisdom of no escape.

Transcript

How is that happening?

.

Tonight.

It is so wonderful to be back with you and to be more and more with you as my brain gets better and my body gets better.

And I thought I would bring you notes from where I've been to really talk about what I'm coming to understand about how we meet suffering and what the place of practice is in suffering.

Most of us come to Zen because something calls us that relates to suffering we've had in our lives,

That relates to what's sometimes translated as the unsatisfactoriness of life.

That we don't come to Zen to help us manage our joy,

We're good with that.

We don't need this practice for that.

We need it for the hard stuff.

We need it for the difficult places.

And we remind ourselves in the Sutra service,

I'm of the nature to grow old,

I'm of the nature to have ill health.

And the Buddha said I teach suffering and the end of suffering.

We remind ourselves all the time that this is a big part of life.

So my recent meeting with suffering was just sort of ordered up out of central casting for Zen.

It happened like all of a sudden,

I had no control over it,

No foresight,

And suddenly there was no escape.

I was one hurting guy.

Not knowing what had happened,

Not knowing if it would ever get better.

And I found myself in a place that I think we've all been at different times in our lives.

This place of saying,

This can't be my life.

It just can't be.

So for you it may have been a health crisis or it may have been,

This can't be what's happening in my relationship.

Or this can't be my job right now.

This can't be our government right now.

But really up against it,

Really up against this,

What Pema Chodron calls no escape.

This backed into a corner feeling there's no place to go,

No way out,

No wiggle room.

And it's that space I've been living in for a few weeks.

Now this is not about my health and one of the dangers of that,

You know,

About talking about this kind of thing is that it can become,

It can feel like it's about that.

But fortunately I am much better.

So really what I want to explore together is this experience of no escape and how we need it.

This reading,

There is No End,

From Katagiri Roshi starts,

If we walk in the desert and cannot see the end,

And I would wager we've all been there,

It is not necessary to become irritated.

Usually if we don't see the end,

We don't know what to do.

Or if the end is far away,

We become upset.

So much of my experience,

And I think many of our experiences,

A sense of there being an end,

Of there being a place to go,

Of there being a path that we are on,

A progress to be made,

Healing to be done,

Improvement to be had.

And what happens when it looks like that's not possible?

It could be worrying about a parent's worsening dementia.

It could be worrying about a child's addiction.

It could be believing yourself to be wrong and never able to make something right.

But that place of no improvement,

Not getting better,

Not knowing.

What I found most striking was that suffering,

And it involved a lot of physical pain and then mental suffering that went with it,

Like what's going to happen to me?

That what went with it was what I came to see was that suffering arouses many of our most vivid habitual delusions about ourselves in the world.

So mine was actually fueled by some of my colleagues and friends who would say to me,

Oh this must be so hard for you,

But it must be easier because you're a Zen practitioner.

That must make it better,

Right?

And I actually said out loud,

No,

It doesn't make it better.

Here I am,

A fully transmitted Zen teacher,

Absolutely miserable,

And at my wit's end.

No way out.

How can that be?

And what I came to understand was that I had a story.

Even though I knew and I've been taught and I teach other people that there's nothing special,

There's nothing to attain,

I kept having the feeling that if I were really a good Zen practitioner,

I'd be fine with all this,

Right?

I'd just be able to sit here and watch pain and it would be all good.

And it wasn't.

I also had the story of myself as one who always could be compassionate,

Who always had room for other people,

Who always could be interested in others,

That my world could be expansive and my attention could be expansive.

And here I was,

This being whose attention was getting more and more narrow,

Just trying to survive from one moment to the next.

How could this be?

This isn't my life.

This isn't who I want to be.

And fortunately,

One of my dear,

Dear Zen colleagues was able to remind me that this was my life,

This was my practice,

And that in some moments of grace,

I could see that.

That I couldn't even do zazen for several weeks.

And here I was with this practice being such an important part of my life and something I love,

Unable to participate.

And fortunately,

Hearing that no,

This was my practice,

My practice was just where I was.

Your practice is just that argument with your boss,

That no way out,

Struggle,

Day after day,

With an impossible teenager.

That sense that I will never be able to find a partner,

No one will ever love me.

That is the place,

That is the place where we practice and we learn.

One of the things I saw about suffering,

And I've seen it before but I saw it so vividly,

Is that it pulls me away from the very things that I learn in this practice.

So two of the core things that I've come to know in my bones,

And I think all of you have had glimpses of this,

Are the truth of impermanence and the truth of our interconnectedness.

And here I was consumed by the idea that this was permanent,

This would never change,

There was no way out.

And here I was convinced that I was just this isolated being and that everybody else was on another side of the divide,

Nobody else was living my experience.

Such a common experience when we're suffering,

Nobody else is in this with me.

So then what happens?

Well,

My mind kept telling me this isn't changing,

This isn't changing,

Until circumstances beat me over the head with the impermanence of my condition,

The fluctuations,

The relief,

The worsening again,

The changes.

And I think when we look at these things that seem like such solid permanent sources of suffering,

A relationship,

Someone else's condition that we can't control,

That when we really look,

We see the ebb and the flow,

The worsening,

The bettering,

The fluctuations that make us realize that nothing is permanent.

And with that,

What I found was moments of where people reached out to me and I had this outpouring of connectedness and feeling not only like other people got it,

But that I got them.

So I noticed that I could lose myself in someone else's concern when they came over and we took a walk and they told me about what was going on.

But I began to sit with my psychotherapy patients and found that actually being able to be concerned about another person's life was one of the most healing,

Pain-relieving things I could do.

That there was something about the interconnectedness,

The suffering together that made compassion arrive.

And that that compassion,

That sense of connectedness that reached across this invisible wall I felt,

Literally relieved physical pain and absolutely relieved emotional pain.

I could not make it happen,

But I could set myself up so that it could happen by accident.

I could make myself prone to the accidents of mutual connection and compassion.

And I began to do that more and more.

There's a passage that I found in a book by John Tarrant.

He wrote a book called The Light Inside the Dark.

John Tarrant is a Zen teacher.

He is our great-grandfather in Zen.

John Tarrant gave Dharma transmission to James Ford.

James Ford gave Dharma transmission to Melissa Blacker.

Melissa gave Dharma transmission to me.

And John is still in his 80s teaching in Arizona.

But he wrote about this.

And sometimes you flip to a passage and suddenly it's speaking directly.

Let's see if I can,

If there's enough light to read this.

Okay,

That was easy.

So John Tarrant writes,

Compassion for others is born of our own experience of suffering.

It first appears at midnight when suffering has rung the self-absorption out of us and broken down the boundaries of that enclose us.

It first appears at midnight when suffering has rung the self-absorption out of us and broken down the boundaries that enclose us.

Then it is a surprise,

The invisible thing that joins us at last to human fate.

We learn to love,

To care for the anguish of others.

Now at noon,

The situation is not desperate or shocking,

Nothing is forced.

Hearing the news that we have the same last names as the blowing grass,

The glow worms in the cave made by the roots of the upturned tree,

And the galaxies living and dying in their vast cycles,

Compassion rises like the evening breeze,

A natural feature of our inner seasons.

The selfish emotions give us pain,

They thicken us,

Constrict the breathing,

But our feeling for others is weightless and old.

We recognize the other,

Our original links to all life.

And what so resonated for me was this idea that my ability to feel compassion arises naturally from this suffering,

Because I get it in the most visceral way.

What it's like to be in pain,

What it's like to be scared you'll never get better,

What it's like to be scared that this situation,

Whatever it might be,

Is never going to change.

And then I see that in somebody else's eyes or hear it in their voice,

And there's a connection that in and of itself is healing.

So what I learned is that my humanity abides no matter how much Zen I practice,

That my frailty,

My capacity to suffer,

My worries and capacity to feel wrong and tortured,

That all of that is there,

Never going to go away.

But that what practice does is it leaves me much more open to capturing these moments of connection and these moments of compassion that not only allow me to be present for other people,

But really become the lifeline for me back into that sense of oneness in the world.

So the practice,

As always,

Is not what I imagined it would be.

It doesn't allow me to arrive at a place where I can be equanimous with whatever is happening.

That's simply not going to be how my heart and mind show up in the world,

And perhaps it's not going to be how yours show up in the world.

But we have the capacity to hold and use the nourishment of our interconnectedness and the nourishment of our presence for what is in this life in a way that the constant turning away and pushing away doesn't allow.

So here we are practicing,

And I'm telling you there's no nirvana to get to,

As always.

It's what we always teach.

But clearly for me this practice has been life-saving,

Literally from moment to moment.

And all of you,

My sangha,

Have been life-saving.

All of you,

My family,

My colleagues,

My friends,

That all of that,

What draws us back into the world and back into our interconnectedness is the balm that the Buddha knew about and kept pointing to throughout his teaching.

Just as sunshine breaks through the clouds,

The compassionate light of our essential nature shines through the cracks in our delusion.

No need to hope for getting rid of those delusions,

They will never be gone.

But what we train ourselves for and what we practice for is to recognize the cracks in those delusions and to see the light that shines through.

Reviews

So my life is just this and this sucks. This somehow becomes my practice, and by not turning alway and escaping in shame, anger, and pretense I can somehow,after a while, see the “cracks” in what I took to be a kind of monolithic impossibility. The cracks are the possible and I see them after somehow hanging on.

As a nurse, I see a lot of suffering. I have recently dealt with suffering greatly myself, and this was perfect in helping me remember the connections I can now bring to my practice.