Hello, thanks for listening to this Darma podcast. I hope you consider that in accordance with the Buddhist tradition all of my work as a teacher is offered without charge and supported entirely by donations only.

If you'd like to support this work you'll find a

PayPal button on darmopunks NYC.com. Pain medications analgesics can be very

helpful but in our culture we tend to be overly reliant on magic bullets,

looking for single solutions, medications that will address all issues and that sets us up for

some of the crises we've been having with painkillers in this country.

60% of Americans who die from opioid abuse suffered from chronic pain.

30% of individuals prescribed will misuse the painkiller that they're prescribed.

80% of addicts started out with prescription opioids to address chronic pain.

There are quite a lot of them on the market.

I mean the obvious culprit, OxyContin,

but then there's also Demerold,

allotted,

Tylenol with coding, Vicodin.

So let's start out with one of the Buddha's most famous suitors where he talks about how we experience pain and very often how we make the experience of pain worse. It's in a

teaching called the Salafah Suta which is the sometimes translated is

Dart Suta or Arrow Suta.

I prefer Arrow, but it's up to you.

And essentially, the teaching goes something like the Buddha

says when a naive person has a painful feeling they generally feel two

pains. One is physical and the other is mental by which the Buddha means psychological.

And he goes on to say it's as if they were shot by an arrow and then chose to shoot themselves with a second arrow. The first arrow being the physical pain,

...