Dearest Friends,

It was nurturing to be in your gracious company again in our most recent gathering.

In our last session, we continued our explorations of how the Buddhist teaching on The Three Marks of Existence can support us in transforming our experiences of stress and anxiety. I expanded on last week’s conversation about the truth of dukkha by sharing the formula suffering = pain x resistance. This relatively famous modern equation—popularized by the American mindfulness teacher Shinzen Young—translates core Buddhist principles into a few simple and practical concepts:

• Pain: This refers to our raw experiences of inevitable, objective distress. In Buddhism, this includes the unavoidable realities of aging, illness, death and loss. To simply be alive means to be vulnerable to pain.
• Resistance: This refers to our subjective rejection of experiences of distress. It’s the stance we embody when we implicitly or explicitly refuse to accept the reality of pain, i.e., “It shouldn’t be this way!” or “This shouldn’t be happening!” In Buddhism, this corresponds to aversion (“I don’t want this!”) and attachment (“I want something else!”).
• Suffering: This refers to the compounding distress generated by our subjective resistance to reality. If our resistance is zero, our suffering becomes zero—even if the pain itself is high. On the other hand, if our resistance is high, the mental multiplier results in significant suffering.

In Buddhist philosophy, this equation mirrors the Parable of the Second Arrow, where the first arrow is the unavoidable pain of life and the second arrow is our own reaction of aversion and rejection. The more resistance we display towards reality, the more arrows we shoot at ourselves. Hence, the aim of practice is to gradually remove our conditioned resistance so that we can reduce the multiplier to zero, i.e., even if the raw, objective discomfort remains, the compounding layer of psychological suffering completely dissolves.

SUGGESTED PRACTICE:

Sit quietly with your gaze lowered or your eyes half-closed. After a few moments, direct your attention to your breath and allow your breath to serve as your “default” anchor to the present moment. The main instruction in this practice, however, is to notice the varieties of physical, emotional and mental discomforts that arise as you simply sit and breathe—and to then attend to the different kinds of resistance that often arise in reaction to these discomforts. With gentle and sustained curiosity, notice the ways that your mind reflexively resists discomfort. Notice how the resistance amplifies the experience of dukkha. Silently conclude the meditation with this quote from the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami: “Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.”

REFLECTION PROMPTS:

• What did you discover or rediscover from undertaking the meditation?
• What are some painful situations in your life right now that you find yourself resisting? Without making your resistance wrong, can you name the ways that it’s amplifying or prolonging your suffering?
• What can support you in softening the resistance just a bit? What perspectives or practices might be helpful?