I read the following paragraph today on Tricycle’s Dhamma Wheel newsletter. This teaching can seem like it takes the “flavor” out of life, but what it actually does is let us experience each moment as it is without judging it. The experience of the moment maybe painful, but resisting or resenting the pain creates a moment of suffering. Pain and suffering don’t necessarily have to go together. There could be just pain, which passes. Suffering extends the pain, amplifies it. “Just as suffering is constructed moment by moment by attaching to the details of sensual experience, wanting the flavors we like and not wanting the flavors we don’t like, so too that very moment of suffering can be deconstructed by abandoning the wanting and not wanting and replacing it with equanimity. We still experience the flavor, directly and intently, but without being entangled with it—only aware of it.”
Pain and suffering
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