Anything Can Hurt (The Buddha)

This is a popular saying of the Buddha that many of you might have heard, but may not have understood it like this! Usually it's something like "life is suffering", which not only sounds awfully uninspiring but is just not what the Buddha actually meant.

I used to have a girlfriend who liked to say "Can't you see that I've suffered more than other people?" (ouch!) and, because her life appeared to have had only about an average amount of misery, this had the consequence of alerting me to the idea of grief as a lifestyle choice. She was looking back at the difficulty in her life, deciding to give them particular Meaning and Importance, and keeping them very determinedly in focus. Prevalent events in her life were usually seen with the filter of previous suffering, and thus relatively small things could produce a shocking amount of pain.

Now in fact she was living a comparatively happy life (which could have been an tremendously blissful life if she'd decided to focus differently), but there are others whose weight of pain is pulling them down to a very low place. How to help?

I've had a handful of clients over the years who were tagged with the D word. Not all of them chose to make use of the D word, although more than one had been medicated as a way to attempt and make the D disappear. In my opinion I don't like the D word as a word, as it's now hopelessly unclear - we make use of it to mean anything from being a bit unhappy occasionally to full-blown not in a position to manage most of the time. It's also a word which immediately puts the victim in a special-but-not-in-a-good-way class - one more burden to bear.

So I would like to talk about Pain. Pain is something we all go through; it does not get us a unique label to hide behind or beat ourselves up with. And it sounds like something that is going to go away one day, which in truth it is.

Generally the biggest challenge for a person in grief is a perception that it won't go away. Ever. Generally the conscious mind says "Oh well I know it will at some instance I believe (subtext: in the far far distant future)" yet, we don't feel any good even after this thought strikes our mind, for some reason. That reason is commonly the unconscious mind, that likes to think pain is here to stay. So the first step in dealing with pain can be to check in with beliefs about the pain.

One more important aspect of pain is a feel of injustice. Unfortunately most of us live in societies that actively nourish a sense that The World Is Unfair and that this is a reason for us not to prefer to live a cheerful life. In an upcoming article I’d like to investigate this in more detail, but just for now, ask yourself: do I sometimes think the world is unfair, and if so, has this view ever, even once, helped to make me happy?

The beliefs that our prevalent dose of pain won’t end, and that we live in an unfair world, can be very powerful.
Deprived of these two sources of fuel, however, most pain just can't survive.

Does grief only come in an extreme form? Far from it! As well as acknowledging that pain is to a great degree a lifestyle choice, this quotation in the title points out that anything can act as a trigger, and the Buddha expanded this idea elsewhere, saying that nearly all of us live with a haze of low-level pain (/unease/dissatisfaction). At times we don't even perceive it, though low energy levels and a less-than-rosy world notion are tell-tale signs.

When we do note it, we often say "Oh well, this sort of thing takes place".
And yes it does, when you choose for it to!
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