Three Kinds of Suffering - Pema Chödrön

[Music] i might let you stand again in a little a minute because i realized there was something i wanted to uh a short teaching i wanted to give before we actually do the compassion practice and and the intention behind giving this teaching on the three kinds of suffering i already listed you know many more than three kinds of suffering but this is sort of like three traditional categories of suffering and the intention of this teaching is to show you that it's not just what we ordinarily think of as suffering for instance for many people it's very easy to think of a laboratory animal and feel compassion or any animals being treated cruelly and to feel compassion and sometimes to the degree that we actually can't bear it but still it automatically flows and there's other uh other things that easily uh awaken our heart so the uh those things are in a category called the suffering of suffering or ordinary suffering it may not be seems so ordinary because it's so there's so much cruelty involved but the suffering of suffering or ordinary suffering is what we usually refer to as suffering and when we do compassion practices it's uh usually at this level which you could say is the outer level the the suffering of of neglect the suffering of poverty the pro suffering of hunger and thirst the suffering of homelessness the suffering of uh violence uh this suffering of discrimination all of these are considered uh suffering of suffering or outer suffering level of outer suffering or ordinary suffering and the word ordinary doesn't mean to belittle these things it's uh it's a healthy category in its own and these categories come from the buddha but then then there's a deeper layers of suffering which are sometimes not acknowledged and one of them is the second one kind of suffering is the suffering of impermanence the suffering that's uh somewhat inherent in being a human being that you want uh things to remain the same and they don't uh that you would like it for instance uh we have this curious um but all very uh universal propensity to prefer pleasure to pain and even those who prefer pain there are quite a few websites devoted to that they get pleasure from it so it's in the pleasure category so we prefer pleasure to pain and that seems like a non no-brainer that we would but it actually that is kind of lopsided because it doesn't allow or give the space or it doesn't give kindness and compassion and doesn't allow for a whole whole huge part of the human experience so the suffering of impermanence includes the fact that there is pleasure in life but it alternates and uh shifts and changes so you have uh let's say like falling in love uh it's a real high when two people love each other and they fall in love and there's that period which is even if they never get married it's sort of called the honeymoon period because it's so pleasurable and brings out the best in both of you usually and uh you often feel a tenderness not just for the beloved but for the whole world and other people it just like awakens such a tenderness in you so somehow if you could keep that open receptive allowing tenderness alive it would be a good thing but what usually happens is that after some time you begin to find fault with the beloved or and or usually and they also find fault with you and then the honeymoon is over and you scramble and scramble and try to get it back but actually you've entered into a maturing phase of your relationship a a going deeper with your relationship and knowing each other more intimately and uh being able to keep that open heart and open mind to each other when you're uh so irritated by each other and so the uh wanting to just to stay smooth and open forever doesn't happen just because of things change and we change and uh so there's an alternation that happens with um something pleasurable morphing into something that is disappointing because you held out such hope for the pleasure to last my brother and i used to eat hershey's chocolate bars in the summer we'd both maybe get one and it was summertime so they were melting as we held them in our hands and the the challenge was who could make their hershey's chocolate bar last the longest and it was like wanting it to last forever you know um and uh you know even as young children we quickly learned that it didn't last forever that the taste finally was gone whether we won and did it the longest or not it's still past so there is pleasure in life there is great beauty in life there's great appreciation and gratitude in life there's great uh uh so much goodness in life and my daughter uh said to me when she was like 14 or something and i was talking to her about the buddha's teachings on suffering and she said well if the if there wasn't any pleasure she said then uh this whole thing would work a lot better and what she meant was that because there's pleasure then you want that to be it and then it shifts and then you feel very unhappy and you feel the sense of loss the sense of disappointment so there's this more subtle level of suffering which is inherent in being a uh being like ourselves uh who wishes for the pleasure and wishes that the uh discomfort would not let would not be there and the fact that because things are changing uh it's inherent in our situation and then this really becomes very uh dramatic when i mean very heightened in our awareness when we when we do hold out hope for outer things to make us happy that's when you really learn about disappointment and impermanence because uh you get a new article of closing clothing and almost everybody when they get the new article of closing certainly true of me although i rarely get any new articles of clothing but when i do and they all look just like the old articles nevertheless there's there's this uh pleasurable feeling of something new and then uh you know you you uh tear it you stain it you uh lose it you it it it or if it just stays perfect for a long time it's boring after a while it's that old shirt that you've had for so long and uh it's the same with a new car a new uh piece of uh something equipment a new computer a new uh piece of furniture a new place to live a new anything there is a kind of high i hear that for shopping for instance they call it what do they call shopping therapy or something like that because it cheers you up but it's built into it inherent in it is the kind of pain because of the fact that uh that that particular uh high or pleasure that we get from outer things whether it's relationship or blouses is subject to impermanence so that's another kind of suffering that's more subtle and that's very universal so sometimes when people are doing compassion practices they say well how how can i do compassion practice for someone i don't know like a stranger because i have no idea what what if they have any pain in their life at all well you could guarantee that they do have this pain of of uh impermanence or uh shifting the fact that things just don't remain the same and then there's the uh most subtle of all and which is called all-pervasive suffering and that is the suffering of wanting ourselves uh our own situation to remain stable not wanting insecurity not wanting uncertainty wanting predictability wanting a sense of security something that we can hold on to and for the same reason that the second suffering based on impermanence we also are not fixed identity we are shifting changing all the time and we experience that as a kind of anxiety a hum of anxiety in the background because of the fact that we can't seem to uh get ground under our feet in any kind of final way and so we're subject to insecurity some subject to uh uh uncertainty subject to um uh not knowing what's going to happen next and so that more subtle level of of suffering or pain which is called the suffering all pervasive pain or also pervasive pervasive discontent again you could do uh compassion practice for anyone and know that they are that they do feel insecure in security they do feel uncertainty they do feel uh like they don't know what's going to happen next so there's these deepening and deepening layers of suffering and we could experience them in our own self and then be have the uh recognition and that this other person this loved one this uh stranger this difficult person also uh suffers in these uh deeper and deeper ways and wish for them to be ourself to be free of it and wish for them to be free of it now in wishing for ourselves to be free of the all-pervasive suffering that doesn't mean at all that we wish that we would never feel insecure again it means that we are comfortable we can allow the feeling of insecurity and we don't struggle against it it's just part of our experience i was talking recently with somebody and a teenage girl 18 years old and she she said to me it was so showed such wisdom she said because of my early childhood on having a alcoholic mother she said i'm coming to realize that this feeling of never having enough is just something i'm going to have to live with and make friends with because i don't think it's in the cards that it's going to actually go away and i thought that's probably true because of the particular cause conditions of her early childhood there was like a wound there that left her feeling needy and wanting more and that uh she was never going to be nothing was ever going to completely fulfill that but she could be okay with that and not and that would mean that she wasn't didn't feel like a victim didn't have so much neediness or at least recognized when she was needy and she could begin to relax with the fact that this was just one of the things that was part of her life and it didn't need to be a big problem for her in fact it could be the basis of empathy for other people in the same boat so if you want to stretch just once more then we will do the practice of receiving compassion [Music]

Channel: Sounds True

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Keywords: soundstrue.com, Sounds True, mindfulness, pema chodron, three kinds of suffering, the freedom to love pema chodron, freedom to love, the four immeasurables

Id: RXEkeiE-OK0

Length: 16min 5sec (965 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 05 2022