Three Kinds of Suffering | Pema Chödrön

I might let you stand again in a minute, because I realized there was something I wanted to, a short teaching I wanted to give before we actually do the compassion practice. And the intention behind giving this teaching on the three kinds of suffering, I already listed many more than three kinds of suffering. But this is sort of like three traditional categories of suffering, and the intention of this teaching is to show you that it's not just what we ordinarily think of as suffering. For instance, for many people, it's very easy to think of a laboratory animal and feel compassion, or any animals being treated cruelly, and to feel compassion. And sometimes to the degree that we actually can't bear it, but still, it automatically flows. And there's other things that easily awaken our heart. So those things are in a category called the suffering of suffering, or ordinary suffering. It may not seem so ordinary, because there's so much cruelty involved, but the suffering of suffering, or ordinary suffering, is what we usually refer to as suffering. And when we do compassion practices, it's usually at this level, which you could say is the outer level. The suffering of neglect, the suffering of poverty, the suffering of hunger and thirst, the suffering of homelessness, the suffering of violence, the suffering of discrimination, all of these are considered a suffering of suffering, or outer suffering, level of outer suffering, or ordinary suffering. And the word ordinary doesn't mean to belittle these things. It's a healthy category in its own. And these categories come from the Buddha. But then there's deeper layers of suffering, which are sometimes not acknowledged. And one of them is, the second one kind of suffering, is the suffering of impermanence. The suffering that's somewhat inherent in being a human being, that you want things to remain the same, and they don't. That you would like it, for instance. We have this curious, but very universal propensity to prefer pleasure to pain. And even those who prefer pain, there are quite a few websites devoted to that, they get pleasure from it. So it's in the pleasure category. So we prefer pleasure to pain, and that seems like a no-brainer, that we would. But actually that is kind of lopsided, because it doesn't allow, or give the space, or it doesn't give kindness and compassion, and doesn't allow for a whole huge part of the human experience. So the suffering of impermanence includes the fact that there is pleasure in life, but it alternates, and shifts, and changes. So you have, let's say, like falling in love. It's a real high when two people love each other, and fall in love. And there's that period, which is, even if they never get married, it's sort of called the honeymoon period, because it's so pleasurable, and brings out the best in both of you, usually. And you often feel a tenderness, not just for the beloved, but for the whole world and other people. It just like awakens such a tenderness in you. So somehow, if you could keep that open, receptive, allowing tenderness alive, it would be a good thing. But what usually happens is that after some time, you begin to find fault with the beloved. And, or, usually, and they also find fault with you. And then the honeymoon is over. And you scramble, and scramble, and try to get it back. But actually, you've entered into a maturing phase of your relationship, going deeper with your relationship, and knowing each other more intimately, and being able to keep that open heart and open mind to each other when you're so irritated by each other. And so, the wanting to just to stay smooth and open forever doesn't happen just because of things change, and we change. And so, there's an alternation that happens with something pleasurable morphing into something that is disappointing, because you held out such hope for the pleasure to last. My brother and I used to eat Hershey's chocolate bars in the summer. We'd both maybe get one. And it was summertime, so they were melting as we held them in our hands. And the challenge was, who could make their Hershey's chocolate bar last the longest? And it was like wanting it to last forever, you know? And even as young children, we quickly learned that it didn't last forever, that the taste finally was gone. Whether we won and did it the longest or not, it still passed. So, there is pleasure in life. There is great beauty in life. There's great appreciation and gratitude in life. There's great, so much goodness in life. And my daughter said to me when she was like 14 or something, and I was talking to her about the Buddhist teachings on suffering, and she said, well, if there wasn't any pleasure, she said, then this whole thing would work a lot better. And what she meant was that because there's pleasure, then you want that to be it. And then it shifts, and then you feel very unhappy. And you feel the sense of loss, the sense of disappointment. So, there's this more subtle level of suffering which is inherent in being a being like ourselves, who wishes for the pleasure and wishes that the discomfort would not be there, and the fact that because things are changing, it's inherent in our situation. And then this really becomes very dramatic I mean, very heightened in our awareness when we do hold out hope for outer things to make us happy. That's when you really learn about disappointment and impermanence. Because you get a new article of clothing, and almost everybody when they get the new article of clothing, certainly true of me, although I rarely get any new articles of clothing, but when I do, and they all look just like the old articles of clothing, nevertheless, there's this pleasurable feeling of something new. And then, you know, you tear it, you stain it, you lose it, or if it just stays perfect for a long time, it's boring after a while. It's that old shirt that you've had for so long. And it's the same with a new car, a new piece of equipment, a new computer, a new piece of furniture, a new place to live, a new anything, there's a kind of high. I hear that shopping, for instance, they call it, what do they call it, shopping therapy, or something like that, because it cheers you up. But it's built into it, inherent in it, is the kind of pain because of the fact that that particular high or pleasure that we get from outer things, whether it's relationship or blouses, is subject to impermanence. So that's another kind of suffering that's more subtle, and that's very universal. So sometimes when people are doing compassion practices, they say, well, how can I do compassion practice for someone I don't know, like a stranger, because I have no idea if they have any pain in their life at all. Well, you could guarantee that they do have this pain of impermanence or shifting, the fact that things just don't remain the same. And then there's the most subtle of all, and which is called all-pervasive suffering. And that is the suffering of wanting our neighbors or ourselves, our own situation to remain stable, not wanting insecurity, not wanting uncertainty, wanting predictability, wanting a sense of security, something that we can hold on to. And for the same reason that the second suffering based on impermanence, we also are not fixed identity. We are shifting, changing all the time, and we experience that as a kind of anxiety, a hum of anxiety in the background because of the fact that we can't seem to get ground under our feet in any kind of final way. And so we're subject to insecurity, subject to uncertainty, subject to not knowing what's going to happen next. And so that more subtle level of suffering or pain, which is called the suffering all-pervasive pain or all-pervasive discontent, again, you could do compassion practice for anyone and know that they are, that they do feel insecure, insecurity, they do feel uncertainty, they do feel like they don't know what's going to happen next. So there's these deepening and deepening layers of suffering, and we could experience them in our own self and then have the recognition that this other person, this loved one, this stranger, this difficult person also suffers in these deeper and deeper ways and wish for them to be, ourself to be free of it and wish for them to be free of it. Now, in wishing for ourselves to be free of the all-pervasive suffering, that doesn't mean at all that we wish that we would never feel insecure again. It means that we are comfortable. We can allow the feeling of insecurity and we don't struggle against it. It's just part of our experience. I was talking recently with somebody, and a teenage girl, 18 years old, and she said to me, it was so, showed such wisdom. She said, because of my early childhood on having an alcoholic mother, she said, I'm coming to realize that this feeling of never having enough is just something I'm gonna have to live with and make friends with because I don't think it's in the cards that it's gonna actually go away. And I thought that's probably true because of the particular conditions of her early childhood. There was like a wound there that left her feeling needy and wanting more and that she was never going to be, nothing was ever going to completely fulfill that, but she could be okay with that and that would mean that she wasn't, didn't feel like a victim, didn't have so much neediness, or at least recognized when she was needy, and she could begin to relax with the fact that this was just one of the things that was part of her life and it didn't need to be a big problem for her. In fact, it could be the basis of empathy for other people in the same boat. So if you wanna stretch just once more, then we will do the practice of receiving compassion.