No one likes pain. No one welcomes adversity. No one wants to feel difficult emotions. If we were to announce someday that we are going to sit down and squarely face our suffering and explore everything that is difficult in our lives, our friends might well be aghast. Yet the process of facing our suffering is not necessarily a gloomy one. It can be the first step in learning to relate to our lives with far greater compassion, openness, and kindness than ever before. It is a pragmatic endeavor, too, for if we are honest with ourselves, we will see that we suffer no matter how hard we try not to. Has there ever been a day without its unpleasant moment? Or a lifetime without accident, illness, loss?
As the heart opens to suffering, compassion flowers and inner conflict begins to diminish. Events may not be as we would have them to be, but as we accept them, we see the beauty of nature shining through what before were regarded as the difficulties of our lives.
- Gavin Harrison, In the Lap of the Buddha
Also found in The Buddha Is Still Teaching, selected and edited
by Jack Kornfield
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