Welcome back to the Jason Gattis podcast. How are you? Today I want to talk about suffering.

Something that a lot of us are familiar with, right? You suffer, I suffer, I suffer, we all suffer.

And it's our relationship to suffering that's the problem. And I want to remind you of a principle from Buddhism about

the four noble truths, and I'm going to talk about the first two. As you know, I'm a Buddhist practitioner, and many years ago, entered into the Buddhist

world through kind of Tibetan Buddhism and eventually studied with Reggie Ray, who studied

with Joghum Trunk-Byrimpshay, who founded Noreopa.

And it's considered one of the people who brought Buddhism to the West.

And what I learned from my teachers at Noreopa, who were a lot of Buddhists, a lot of mentors, a lot of meditation teachers, and then my main teacher, was that the

First Noble Truth, you know, states that life is suffering. That's Dukha. And suffering exists

as a thing. And part of life is suffering. To suffer is to live.

To live is to suffer.

And unfortunately, in our Western society, people have an aversion to suffering.

They either want it to go away.

They don't like seeing other people in pain, of course, or they don't like suffering themselves.

And I'm one of those people.

I don't love suffering.

And I largely accept it because it's just a part of life.

And the second noble truth is kind of my favorite, which basically says that suffering

is created by our seeking pleasure and avoiding pain.

And, man, are we good at this one?

I want to get rid of my pain and I want to feel good, right?

Who doesn't want that?

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