Is There a Benefit to Meditation Training?

Though there are three fundamental forms of suffering, as mentioned above, the ups and downs of daily life seem to generate many forms of unhappiness and distress. Every little occurrence can seem like further pain and suffering. This illusion may lead us to view illness, for example, as distinct from loss, fear, or depression. These circumstances do occur, and each can be included in the three forms of suffering, but the immediate experience of them may cause you to segregate them into myriad forms of suffering and therefore not truly understand how they arise. For example, suffering might occur when people experience poverty, disagreements, heartbreak, or romantic breakups. Our minds are captured by these events, and we tend to repeatedly mull them over. We fixate on them and, like an anchor on a boat, we are held tight in the experience. We wonder why we must suffer and when our situation is going to improve. Yet dwelling on suffering causes it to increase. Like any negative circumstance, mentally obsessing over them by continuing to replay them in our minds only aggravates our disturbing responses. Carrying suffering in our minds exaggerates it, but with meditation training, we could simply lay down the experience of suffering instead of causing it to infuse our whole state of mind.

In the same way, when encountering a hardship, we might erroneously think it is solely caused by something from outside of ourselves. For example, you might be driving along and someone in another vehicle gives you a dirty look. Then you think about how the person glared at you and focus on blaming them. Yet look at it this way: It is a twofold process involving somebody outside of yourself glaring and, secondarily, you taking that glare into your mind, engaging your mind with a reaction to the glaring. So, not only did you observe someone glaring but your mind also appropriated the glare. Appropriating something into one’s mind is what causes the experience of suffering. The fact of someone randomly glaring at another person is not, by itself, capable of creating suffering. If the mind does not engage with and focus on it, then it will not cause a reaction.

Excerpt From
Loving Life as It Is
Chakung Jigme Wangdrak

Image: Méditation, Henri Martin