Anything Can Hurt: The Buddha

This is a quotation many of you will have come across, but maybe not translated like this! Usually it’s something like “life is pain”, 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 seemed to have had only about an common amount of misery, this had the effect of alerting me to the idea of pain as a lifestyle option. She was looking back at the misfortune in her life, choosing to give them particular Meaning and Significance, and keeping them very firmly in focus. Current events in her life were often seen through the filter of previous suffering, and thus relatively minor things could create a shocking amount of pain.

Now in fact she was living a relatively happy life (which could have been an awesomely pleasurable life if she’d decided to focus in a different way), but there are other people whose burden of pain is dragging them down to a very low place. How to assist?

I’ve had several 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. Personally I don’t like the D word as a word, as it’s now hopelessly ambiguous – we make use of it to mean anything from being a bit down occasionally to full-blown not able to cope 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 speak about Pain. Pain is one thing we all undergo; it does not get us a unique label to hide from view or beat ourselves up with. And it seems like something that’s going to go away one day, which in reality it is.

Usually the greatest challenge for an individual in pain is a belief that it won’t go away. Ever. Usually the conscious mind says “Oh well I know it will at some point I believe (subtext: in the far far distant future)” but for some reason that doesn’t always make us feel good. That reason is typically the unconscious mind, that likes to think pain is here to stay. So the first measure in dealing with pain can be to inspect in with beliefs about the pain.

When we are in grief, we feel that everything that is happening with us is unfair. Sadly for us, we all live in communities that stress on the belief that The World Is Unfair and because of this we should not choose to live our lives in a happy way. In a future article I’d like to explore 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 cheerful?

The beliefs that our present 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 simply can’t survive.

Does pain only come in an extreme form? Far from it! And also acknowledging that pain is to a great degree a lifestyle choice, this quotation in the title shows that everything can act as a trigger, and the Buddha expanded this thought somewhere else, saying that almost all of us live with a smog of low-level pain (/unease/dissatisfaction). At times we don’t even notice it, though low energy levels and a less-than-rosy world view are tell-tale signs.

When we do note it, we often say “Oh well, this sort of thing happens”. And yes it does, when you choose for it to! Live the difference Life Coaching is based in Melbourne which offers transformational one-on-one coaching both face-to-face and on the phone. People come from all walks of life and live in and around Melbourne, interstate and overseas.

Visit https://livethedifference.com.au for more information on Life Coach