Those who have experienced great suffering must win in life and become happy.
If you feel like you are always losing and miserable, then maybe your understanding and perception need some tweaks. Each and everyone of us is going to experience difficulty and hardships; its part of life. To try and avoid or distance oneself from these times is to avoid some valuable lessons and insights into our most meaningful moments – those with something to teach us.
The approach is actually very rational and down to earth. It’s saying that whatever problems we have, they all come from causes. So we have to look very honestly and deeply inside ourselves to see what the difficulties are that we are facing. For many of us, that’s not a very easy process. It’s quite painful actually to look to see what the difficult areas in our life are. Buddhism teaches that our attention and presence to any situation often shines some much needed light into those dark moments.
Through a willingness to embrace difficulty and learn something, anything from the process we began to dilute that first gut reaction. We may not feel like we are ready to lovingly embrace our difficulty but we take one small and powerful step torwards being present to it and when we do so we are more understanding, more resilient and yes we can learn so much more about ourselves and our reactions.
That is one of the founding principles and reason for our practice.
Peace and Love, Jim
