Welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast. This is episode

number 57. I am your host Noah Rasheda and today I'm talking about all

pervasive suffering. What is it and more importantly how do we identify it when

we're experiencing it?

It's a good reason why we talk about suffering so often in Buddhism. Suffering is

the central problem that Buddhism addresses. It's recognizing our suffering as the

first step to its solution. We talk about how suffering is a universal truth

along with impermanence, along with interdependence. It's one of the three

basic qualities of existence, also known as the three marks of existence, but

suffering itself comes in many forms and we talk about it often in the

context of three overall categories, three different categories and these are

the three basic patterns of suffering that we experience in our lives. So the

first one is the suffering of suffering. I talked about this in early on in the

podcast. I want to say within the first five episodes maybe it was number two,

probably number two, but the suffering of suffering, the first type of suffering,

this is what we're all familiar with. This is the pain of birth, old age, sickness,

and death. This is very easy to understand the suffering of suffering. The

second is the suffering of change or the suffering of loss. And this is how we

feel when we don't get what we want or we do get what we want, but we can't hold

on to it. Right, like youth, the aging can can fit into this. If things aren't

going the way that we want them to or losing a job, you know, change itself, I

think fits nicely into the second category, the suffering of change. But the

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