The following passage is a beautifully eloquent explanation of the importance of not running from our own pain by Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh…

Thich Nhat Hanh (From a Question and Answer session on July 20, 1998)

Suppose you have a depression and you want to get away from it. How can you get away from it? You have to embrace it and look deeply into it and identify the causes that have brought it to you. Then you can learn from your depression, and then you can enjoy the non-depression, the well being that you can afford to have. If you know how to cut the source of nutriment that has brought on your depression, then you are on your way to emancipation, and you begin to enjoy your non-depression. It is like your toothache. I hope that in this moment you don’t have a toothache, yet you don’t enjoy your non-toothache until you have a toothache. Suffering from your toothache you get enlightened: you say: “It’s wonderful not to have a toothache.” So, how to enjoy your non-toothache? Just remember the time when you had a toothache. Suffering plays a very important role in helping you to be happy. That is why even what you call suffering, loneliness, meaninglessness, sadness, fear and despair can be wonderful, because it is thanks to them that you have an opportunity to discover what freedom, stability, friendship, interbeing and love are.

So let us not run away from our garbage; we should learn the art of making compost. Using that compost we will grow a lot of flowers. Don’t think that without compost you can have flowers. That is an illusion. You can have flowers only with compost. That is the insight of interbeing – look into the flower and you will see the compost. If you remove the compost that became the flower, the flower will disappear also. What you are looking for, freedom, joy, and stability, you know that suffering plays a very important role in it. So be aware that we cannot just run away from our problems. In fact, we have to go back to our problems. The practice of calming, of concentrating, of embracing, of looking deeply into the nature of our pain, is absolutely necessary for us to get the transformation, the healing that we need so much.

By David B. Younger, Ph.D

Pain and sadness to do not disappear when we avoid them.  No one enjoys feeling sad or lonely, but it’s part of being human.  Feelings and thoughts are ephemeral.  It is when we cling to them or run away from them that they persist.  When we feel good, we want it to last forever.  When we feel bad, we just want it to disappear. 

I find that when I talk with my patients about an anguish that they are experiencing that the sole act of giving space or allowing for the feeling to be there versus wishing it away, provides relief and inevitably detracts from the intensity of the feeling.  It’s not magic.  It doesn’t mean that the sadness just disappears completely, but it helps.  It’s normal to feel pain and sadness just as it is to feel happiness and joy, but everything is temporary.  Acknowledging this can bring about its own mixed feelings. You are not your feelings just as you are not your mind or your body.  Your feelings and thoughts and your mind and your body are constantly changing.  The only thing that stays the same is the entity that observes the changes, the entity that can identify how the body changes between time x and y.  This observing entity, which some refer to as the soul, exists outside of time and is not subjected to the same principles as the mind and the body. 

Exercise: Try sitting in a quiet place and closing your eyes and concentrating on your breath.  Notice the sensations as you breathe in, how your belly rises or your chest expands.  Observe how it feels as you exhale.  Different thoughts and feelings will inevitably keep appearing in your mind as you breathe.  Notice them.  If you start to feel sadness, identify the feeling inside your mind as sadness and gently return to your breath.  Whenever your mind begins to wander, acknowledge where it goes and bring it back to the breath.  Try this for 5 minutes and you can see how active the mind is and how difficult it can be to simply stay with the breath without intruding thoughts and feelings.  You can also get a sense for the act of observing that I referred to earlier as well as the act of letting go. 

Thoughts and feelings are like waves that are not meant to be dammed up.  Meditating for a short time each day is a very helpful way to practice the art of observing and letting go.

By David B. Younger, Ph.D

One of the therapy groups that I run is composed of an eclectic mix of people from all over the world who have one big thing in common: they are out of work due to accidents on the job.  I have written about this before because many of these people are treated like criminals even though they have done nothing wrong.  One of my patients referred me to the movie Marathon Man by Dustin Hoffman.  He says that this entire experience has made him paranoid.  He doesn’t know who he can trust.

That’s not the theme of this post though.  I am writing because I met with my group on the day before Thanksgiving and they all started talking about their physical pain, financial woes, and overall frustrations.  This is par for the course and I always stress the importance that they have a space where they can talk about all of this, a space where they can be heard and seen.  I am convinced that this will have a positive impact on their psychological health and on their physical health. 

This group is a veritable United Nations.  I am the only American-born person in the group.  We have representatives from Trinidad, Jamaica, Poland, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.  Frankly, it is one of the things I most treasure about being in New York that I have the privilege to work with such a potpourri of people.  I learn so much from them.

I will get to the point now.  I interrupted the group’s collective tirade as it was hitting its crescendo and I asked one of the members what she was thankful for.  She told me she was thankful for her friends and family, thankful that she is a part of this group and that she is still breathing.  We went around the room.  Most of the members had things they were thankful for.  One of the members needed some nudging from a fellow member, but she too found a voice. 

We transitioned somewhat seamlessly from a focus on what was lacking to what was abundant and the energy in the room was substantially changed.  As difficult as things may be in any given moment, and as much as there is that is simply out of our control, we do have control over what we choose to focus on.  No one can tell us how to think or what to think about.  This is for each and every one of us to decide.  Sure, it is an enormous challenge to think of all that we have when we are depressed and the glass is half empty, but it is possible.  There is always hope and it is so important not to overlook all of the things that we have to be grateful for including the fact that we are breathing.

David B. Younger, Ph.D

It’s fair to say that most people do not enjoy suffering, nor would most people choose to suffer.  Yet in our society there is a collective abhorrence of suffering and the zeitgeist of the modern era is that it’s all about being happy. 

By David B. Younger, Ph.D