What Suffering is Made Of

There is the suffering of the body, including the sensations of pain,
illness, hunger, and physical injury. Some of this suffering is simply
unavoidable. Then there is the suffering of the mind, including anxiety,
jealousy, despair, fear, and anger. We have the seeds, the potential
in us for understanding, love, compassion, and insight, as well as the
seeds of anger, hate, and greed. While we can’t avoid all the suffering
in life, we can suffer much less by not watering the seeds of suffering
inside us.
Are you at war with your body? Do you neglect or punish your
body? Have you truly gotten to know your body? Can you feel at home
with your body? Suffering can be either physical or mental or both,
but every kind of suffering manifests somewhere in the body and
creates tension and stress. We are told that we should release the
tension in our body. Many of us have tried very hard! We want to
release the tension in our body, but we can’t release it. Our attempts at
reducing tension in us won’t work unless we first acknowledge that
it’s there. When you cut your finger, you just wash it and your body knows
how to heal. When a nonhuman animal living in the forest is injured,
she knows what to do. She stops searching for something to eat or looking
for a mate. She knows, through generations of ancestral knowledge,
that it’s not good for her to do so. She finds a quiet place and just
lies down, doing nothing. Nonhuman animals instinctively know that
stopping is the best way to get healed. They don’t need a doctor, a drugstore,
or a pharmacist.
We human beings used to have this kind of wisdom. But we have
lost touch with it. We don’t know how to rest anymore. We don’t allow
the body to rest, to release the tension, and heal. We rely almost
entirely on medication to deal with sickness and pain. Yet the most
effective ways to ease and transform our suffering are already available
to us without any prescription and at no financial cost. I’m not suggesting
that you should throw away all your medications. Some of us
do need to use certain medicines. But we can sometimes use them in
smaller quantities and to much greater effect when we know how to let
our body and mind truly rest.