Many people seem to think that suffering is the same thing as pain. They ask, “If I didn’t have suffering, then wouldn’t I burn my hand on something hot?” In this case, pain is a sensation that the body uses to tell the brain to move the hand. What we call pain is just an intense sensation. When we resist pain, that is suffering. When we resist anything, including resistance, that is suffering.
Suffering is a desire, often subtle, for things to be different than they are, or a fear, often subtle, that things might change. When we take a good look at reality, we find that reality is all that is actually happening and that it is continually changing. To want anything else than reality is insanity.
Most of us are suffering all the time, although it might take a 10-day Vipassana retreat, without any distractions, to notice the depth and breadth of this suffering, to notice the continual and desperate attempt to escape from reality into some imaginary and better future (that doesn’t exist).
Many people will claim, “I don’t experience any suffering,” only to then complain about their partner, rack up more debt on their credit card, and down a couple of glasses of wine. We’re usually in denial about how much we suffer because we’re so attached to the complex web of concepts we hold about how we can eventually find fulfillment and peace: the promotion, the house…
