Four Ways to Deal with Life’s Challenges - Without Suffering Them with Rick Hanson

I offer these every week along with a guided meditation. Just click the subscribe link below to be notified through YouTube when I post the latest recording. Or, if you'd like to join us live, which would be great, just go into the description section below and follow the link along to be able to sign up for free. There's a traditional saying from the Buddha Dharma that your mind takes its shape from what it repeatedly rests upon. And modern brain science would say that your brain takes its shape from what your mind repeatedly rests upon, literally in terms of its structure and function. So it's sobering and it's really helpful to ask ourselves, where do we normally, typically rest our mind? Do we rest it on invasive ruminations, anxieties, angers, feelings of inadequacy? Or do we rest it on, authentically, a sense of mindfulness, compassion, self-compassion, and contentment and inner peace? So much of what practice is basically about is very straightforward and it's not complicated. Minute after minute after minute, what's our relationship with what we are experiencing? And to what extent are we disengaging from what is not helpful for us and others? And to what extent are we leaning into? And the Buddha, who grew up as a farmer, talked a lot about nutriments, fertilizer. In other words, to what extent are we feeding and fertilizing the ground of what we'd like to encourage in ourselves and in other people? And so when we do a practice in which we lean into, as best we can, in the present, authentic experiences of feeling an enoughness already in the present, a peacefulness already in the present, a lovingness already in the present, we are cultivating those qualities in us as we rest our mind upon them, and along the way, gradually hardwiring them, literally, into our own body, particularly its nervous system and the headquarters of the nervous system, the brain. Beautiful practice. So you might ask yourself multiple times a day, what are you leaning into? Is it helping or hurting? And decide accordingly what's appropriate to do. This is not about positive thinking or looking on the bright side. This is about strengthening ourselves to deal with what is difficult, which includes recognizing painful feelings and unjust conditions or unfortunate conditions in the world and doing what we can about them. If we're having painful experiences, being spacious about them, being open about them mindfully, means that we're not reinforcing them. But to the extent that we are resting our mind upon them and glued to that screen, looping through that story, blah, blah, blah, we are reinforcing them in our brain. That's the key distinction. So I'd like to talk about the first truth offered by the Buddha for the noble ones. And that is the truth in the traditional word of dukkha. Dukkha is a difficult word to translate. It is routinely badly translated as suffering, which obscures an absolutely crucial distinction. Dukkha does refer to pain, but the opportunity through practice is to experience the pains of life, the emotional pains and the physical pains of life, without suffering them. In a nutshell, it is the second noble truth, the second truth, which is for the noble ones, of craving, which when added to dukkha, creates suffering. It's as simple as that. Dukkha with craving is suffering. Dukkha with equanimity and wisdom is inner peace, contentment, and love. That's the difference. So it's really, really crucial to understand dukkha and explore our relationship to it. This is not some kind of airy-fairy, technical, semantic, pedagogical, pedantic thingamajigger. This is hardcore. So I want to start by just raising the question right off the top of, if you think about the three essential elements of dukkha, traditionally taught in the Buddhadharma, number one, sometimes there are unpleasant experiences. People get in your way when you're trying to move through a doorway, and you've got a deadline. People don't agree with you immediately. What? Toothaches. The three heavenly messengers of aging, disease, and death. People in my larger family system and others I know of are grappling with really serious health conditions. Dukkha. Children leave home and it's sorrowful. Loved ones pass away. Dukkha. Sometimes real crud happens, including in clusters. Terrible things sometimes happen in the world. Recognizing them as dukkha does not justify them or minimize their horribleness. On the other hand, that's part of dukkha in its first attribute. Sometimes painful, morally bad things can happen. Second aspect of dukkha is that, like all experiences, including painful ones, pleasant experiences come to an end. That does not mean that living is inherently unsatisfactory because that which is enjoyable comes to an end, because also unpleasant experiences often come to an end, and in any case, the next moment is always arising. In other words, the endingness of all experience is not inherently unsatisfactory because it is continuously offset by the endless arisingness of the next experience. So that's the second aspect of dukkha. Yeah, all good things end eventually. The third aspect of dukkha is that all experiences, and broadly all phenomena fundamentally, but certainly our experiences, are made of parts that are connected and changing. They are therefore incapable, no single experience is capable of lasting happiness. We cannot halt the river of the stream of consciousness. We cannot possess an experience. We cannot keep it, and in fact, when we try to keep it, as you've noticed I'm sure many times, it becomes contracted and we lose what is pleasant and enjoyable about it. So these are the three aspects of dukkha. What's our relationship to dukkha? I myself, being candid, both have a tendency to want to sort of swing over or swing past unpleasant experiences, sort of like an heroic figure in an old movie swinging on a vine over a river of alligators, grinning along the way. Would me worry? I have some tendencies in that department. I also have tendencies toward goal-directed accomplishment. So when I see a problem, I want to fix it, or I see a goal, I want to achieve it. And that tendency as well can lead to a certain frustration or disappointment or irritation at whatever is getting in the way. For these two reasons, and probably some other reasons as well, I tend to resist dukkha. Maybe I'm not alone. There are other people who, like me, could improve in their accepting of the inherent dukkha in life. And recently, that's actually been really valuable for me. I'm involved in different situations, and I'm very fortunate in many ways. Fortune comes from multiple, three primary sources, luck, noble effort, and advantage. I've been advantaged through disadvantaging others in various systemic ways. The combination of fortune or luck, including natural talent, let's say, the genetic lottery, and effort, combined with advantage, can lead to a certain amount of good fortune. So even in my fortunate life, there are impediments, there are obstructions, there are people who I feel like I have to haul uphill, and I don't want to. Dukkha, right? Dukkha. Power outages, the results of elections, people who you listen to talking on television, and you just go, what in the world? You know, your relatives, your in-laws, your family, your adult children, I shall name no one here. You have your own list, I'm sure. The question becomes, what happens for you when you move into greater acceptance of the normalcy of Dukkha? Doesn't mean we like it, doesn't mean we approve of it, but suddenly, when we accept it, huh, we have less friction with it, and therefore, less suffering. So I want to start with acceptance. Tara Brach has written an absolutely seminal book called Radical Acceptance. I recommend it and her work in general. I also love her book, Trusting the Gold, which is kind of an evolution very much from the heart of her work. It's a very simple, powerful, beautiful book, Trusting the Gold, with these lovely watercolor drawings in it. I forget the name of the artist who clearly made a huge contribution to that book, too, Trusting the Gold. So acceptance. Just think about conditions in your life that irritate you because they exist. That's excess suffering right there, that irritation that they exist. We can still see them clearly. We can still have a values-based view about, you know, what we're trying to create more of in our lives and world, and what we're trying to create less of, but we don't have to feel offended by the ordinary dukkha of life. So I invite you into that consideration. And then, additionally, I want to talk about the craving that we add to dukkha. But before I do that, I see a comment from John Mickelson, and six minutes passed, and John's aware of what I'm speaking to here. In Buddhist circles, there is often the view, which I think has become dogmatic, that the present moment is inherently unsatisfactory. Now, if I were to say to you that the coffee in here is unsatisfactory, that would be aversive. That would be critical of it. I would be saying, eh, the coffee's unpleasant. That's what unsatisfactory means. If I were to turn in an email or write a book, and someone were to say, this is really unsatisfactory, Dr. Hansen, whoa, that's pretty, you know, that's like, whoa, it sucks, in a word. Well, why would the present moment be inherently unsatisfactory? Simply because it's continuously changing. And I think that's a relic of early Buddhism and its kind of tendency toward a dour, grim, world-denying dogmatism that slipped in after the Buddha passed away. I don't think the present is inherently unsatisfactory or satisfactory. It simply is what it is, continuously changing. And if it's supposedly unsatisfactory because the present moment is always slipping away, well, that's offset endlessly by the arisingness of the next moment. So that's what John is speaking to here, the word unsatisfactoriness. I don't think it's inherently unsatisfactory at all. And in fact, the reality that we are continuously receiving the next moment as an extraordinary gift due to the temporal expansion of the universe, in which we're always living in creation on the front edge of now, recognizing that can really help release a lot of craving. Because you're feeling almost overwhelmed by the giftedness and the givingness of the arising moment. Craving, whoosh, I'm too busy in the present to crave, right? So this recognition of the arisingness of the present can be a beautiful undermining of the habits of craving, okay? So I want to talk about four marks of craving and how to release them. Here we go. You can notice this. The first mark of craving is contraction. Contraction. You can feel it in your body when you're driven about something, or it must happen, or you're clinging to it. Craving, in a word. You're fighting with something. Craving. Gotta have it. Mark. There's a sense of contraction in your body and your mind. The tension narrows, it fixates on the goal, the body contracts, you know, the muscles tense, ready for fighting and fleeing or freezing. That's the mark of craving. On the other hand, what happens when you open out, you lift your gaze to the volume of the room as a whole that you're in? What happens? What happens when you lift your gaze to the horizon? What happens when you move more into the bird's eye view, the big picture, you know? The structure of suffering is parts struggling with parts. If you're, as I often am, in organizational settings, working with people, team of people, and I start having opinions about what they're doing to me or what they're not doing that they should be doing, I'm caught up in a part of the whole. But when I expand out and see, okay, big picture, causes and conditions, many things have led to this, including me. Much less suffering. Instantly. Or very quickly. You can notice that. So right here, we have the first mark of the craving that when added to dukkha, which is unavoidable in life, leads to suffering. And by the way, often we had craving when there's no dukkha. Nothing unpleasant has happened. Just here. But the brain has this habit of craving, because that's what helped our ancestors live to see the sunrise. You know, we look for something new to want or something new to fear or someone, someone to cling to, right? That creates suffering in the present as we contract around that. Okay? So contraction or expansion, you know, contracting or opening. Right there. So useful. Second mark of dukkha. Invasive negative emotion. Key word there is invasive. It's normal to experience, for example, anxiety, shame, or anger, each of them a spectrum. A continuum of particular kinds of emotions. It's normal to experience that. It's when they are invasive. As the Buddha put it, it's when they invade and remain that craving begins. We crave to make them go away because they're unpleasant. Or they hijack us and a whole set of beliefs and perspectives and motivations follow. Feeling drives wanting. Wanting drives feeling sometimes, but very often we start with the emotion and the wanting and the drivenness follows on its heels with contraction along the way. Invasive negative emotion. Not bad, but I think actually people really tend to underestimate the corrosive power of invasive negative emotion. It drives stress. Stress, the hallmark of, you know, it's normal to be energized and active and deal with things. If accompanied by positive emotion, we don't pay the price of stress. We don't accumulate allostatic load, generally speaking, which is why, as Robert Sapolsky put it, why zebras don't get ulcers. It's when, you know, negative emotions are invasive that cortisol is released. You know, there are all kinds of toxic processes in our metabolism. It's not good for us. And I think sometimes these days in our culture, people play too fast and too loose with the consequential effects of invasive negative emotions over time. There's so much of a fear about having a kind of rose-colored glasses, la-di-da, you know, new age, whatever attitude, that that pendulum can swing too far and be all too glib or casual or stoic about invasive negative emotion. You know, just kind of sitting on the sizzler, sitting on the hot plate and sizzling away stoically. I've got nothing against stoicism. I'm just pointing out that I think it's really prudent for people who care about themselves and also care about the brain and the body to not underestimate the negative impact on health and longevity and relationships of invasive negative emotions, including negative emotions that invade a relationship or a family system or a country, getting endlessly caught up in beating the drum of grievance and vengeance to follow. So the alternative to invasive negative emotion is stepping back so you're not invaded. Mindfulness. Spacious awareness. Naming them. Name it to tame it, as the proverb puts it. That is a great antidote to invasive negative emotion. You know, caring enough about yourself to bring compassion to negative emotions. They're unpleasant, you know. They're difficult for us. Those are all ways to practice with invasive negative emotions. And in particular, over time, build up the traits in yourself, hardwired into your body and brain, the traits of positive emotion, authentically positive emotion, like building up trait sense of calm strength and with regard to invasive negative anxiety, invasive anxiety. Build up a sense of contentment, gratitude, basic happiness in the present, instead of an invasive sense of disappointment, frustration, depression. And also build up a sense of worth and the innate goodness in your own heart and kindness and lovingness for others as the field they pass through, even if you want to minimize your contact with them. Now all that, instead of resentment and hatred and shame and feeling inadequate, cultivate traits of positive emotion so that when circumstances arise that understandably activate negative emotions, they land on a brain and a heart that's really been trained. And developed habits and moves underlying that are protective and antidotes. Third hallmark of craving. Third hallmark of craving is mental time travel. Going into the past or going into the future, which drives the ruminator essentially in our brain, in the default mode network. And there's a place for wise reflecting on the past and anticipating and imagining different potential options in the future and choosing wisely as you kind of play out those movies and you see how they turn out. The survival advantage, one of the great distinctions between the human brain and that of those of our nearest relatives among the other great apes, chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos, orangutans, I believe, etc. Is that they are not able to do mental time travel. They are trapped in the present, which is not a horrible thing. But humans evolved this capacity for mental time travel, imagining the future, reflecting on the past, because it was fantastic advantages. Okay, there's a place for that. But on the other hand, so much of our craving is involved with, you know, ruminating with regret or remorse or resentment, the big R's, the big RE's, regret, remorse, resentment about the past, which then drives contraction, invasive negative emotion and craving. Or getting caught up in and sort of pinned to certain futures that you really want to maintain. They must occur, or you feel really upset that they won't occur, or you feel very much in doubt about whether they will occur. In particular, anticipatory dukkha drives craving, fearing that something. So I know somebody, who shall be nameless, who often has insomnia related to the fear of not falling asleep. This is very common, very common. Or the fear that, oh, if I, you know, get up to attend to something, or go to the bathroom, or, you know, move my blankets, if I do that, I won't be able to return to sleep. But that anticipatory dukkha, right, the anticipation of a bad event, actually prevents sleep. It would be much wiser to just sort of, to essentially accept whatever will happen, will happen. And then, as I have found is very effective, actually, kind of as a trick, take the sense of drowsiness as your object of meditation, and become increasingly absorbed in it, or whatever else it is you do. Or get up, you know, or whatever. Okay, so anticipatory dukkha. Mental time travel. Instead, what? We stay in the present, right? The quote I put in from, where am I here? For a while ago, about from the Buddha dharma, staying in the present. Really good. All the great teachers, Ram Dass included, bless his memory. Be here now. As much as you can, pull out of mental time travel into the present. And as you do that, you'll notice that craving tends to reduce. The fourth mark of craving. Selfing. Taking it personally. Now, to be really clear, there are persons. And it is really important to protect persons, honor them, love them, help them, including the person who wears your name tag. Crucially important. Actually, when we don't take care of ourselves as a person, that tends to drive the contractions and cravings of the sense of me, myself, and I. It's, right, because if you feel filled up and basically okay and supported, including by the most important ally you have, yourself, then there's less need to take life so personally, to get possessive, to get righteous and positional. You're more able to move through life as a person without the burden of tons of contracted selfing along the way. You'll find often that we start with a sense of contraction and invasive negative emotion with mental time travel. And then the sense of self over the next few seconds after all that starts getting stronger and stronger and stronger. Craving constellates selfing. It is also true the sense of self can generate some craving. But very often, if you watch in the mind stream, you're rolling along, there's not much sense of self. And then you start, you know, something is bothersome, something is scary. There's contraction around it. There's kind of like, oh, what should I do? What should I do? It's future oriented. And then the I in what should I do? What should I do? Gets more and more built out in your stream of consciousness. That's very interesting to observe. Okay, what's the alternative to selfing? Take really good care of yourself as a person and be very alert to the three R's, the three Re's. And I'm going to add a fourth R, righteousness. You know, resenting, full of self. Regretting, full of self. Remorse, full of self. And righteousness, righteousness. Wow, so easy to identify with, right? So when we're aware of the four R's, resentment, regret, remorse, and righteousness, we can step back from them as best we can and let them flow and not feed them or follow them. That really helps. We disidentify from them. You know, the sense of self and its various fuels in the stream of consciousness is an eddying in that stream, a swirling in that stream. Like anything else, like hearing, like seeing, like remembering, like wanting. Yeah, no problem. Just flotsam and jetsam in the streaming of consciousness. No worries. The problem becomes when we identify with those, you know, swirling objects in the stream of consciousness of self and claim them as our own. And they are, the sense of self is, of course, one of the most seductive experiences or contents and awareness of all. But if we can just watch them go by, oh, self, oh, taking it personally, oh, really getting righteous about this one, Rick. Whatever it is for you, naming entertainment. And then it doesn't compel us and capture us as it rolls on by. Okay, so summary here. There is no escape from dukkha. Dukkha being the first truth for the noble ones. And you might ask yourself, why is that a truth for a noble being? Well, what is noble within us draws us to face the fact of dukkha, which means that there's always going to be inherently in life some unpleasant experiences. Also, all pleasant experiences will end eventually one way or another, including by our own, you know, death of the mortal body. And all experiences are insubstantial and foamy and empty of essence. And therefore, no single experience is capable of providing lasting happiness. That's dukkha, okay? Can we accept the dukkha in your life? Can we even, this is hard for me, certainly, and probably any other parent. Can we accept that your children's lives will have dukkha? And that the lives of others you care about, even love dearly, will also have dukkha? Can we not resist the fact of dukkha? And then on that basis, can we have wisdom about the ways in which craving, which is a drive state, it's a natural biological condition that evolved, and still, can we be aware and can we practice with the ways that that drive state, when applied to dukkha, creates suffering and harm? And in that practice, therefore, can we be aware of the four marks of craving? And the four escapes, the four ways to practice with those four marks. You know, can we be aware of contracting or opening? That's number one. Can we be aware of invasive negative emotions? And instead, can we be mindful of them, stepping back from them so we're not hijacked by them? Can we practice with releasing them? And can we practice with replacing them by cultivating the habit or the underlying mood in which we are increasingly saturated in a basic sense of peacefulness, contentment, and love? As the foundation of resilient well-being. That's second. Third, can we be aware of mental time travel? Mental time travel as a mark of craving, going into the future, going into the past. And can we be aware of the ways in which a little bit of that goes a long way, but when we're caught up in, when we're ruminating about the past or the future, craving would follow. Instead, can we be aware of that kind of ruminating and come into the present? Can we draw lessons from the past as appropriate? And can we make effective good plans for the future and then let it go and really enjoy being in the present? You know, a sense of being content in the present and at peace in the present and with a warm heart in the present can really help us stay in the present because then it's really enjoyable. We are rested in being rather than moving into, as the Buddha cautioned us about, warned us about, rather than moving into becoming, which is about the future. Okay. And then last, sense of self. Is there, you know, are we being hijacked by a very strong sense of self? Me, mine, how dare you? What about me? Possessiveness, you know, identification with different views, righteousness, resentments, resenting, remorsing, regretting, and righteous saying, can we be aware of that? And instead, can we take really good care of ourselves as a person, receiving into ourselves those good supplies of healthy narcissistic supplies, feeling good enough as a being? Can we stand up for ourselves? Can we take action in our lives to make our lives as good as possible? And can we have kind of a big picture awareness of the ways in which our personing, our mind-body process with a coherent and a particular identity over a lifespan, that our mind-body process is like a wave emerging in the Pacific Ocean for a time due to causes and conditions, and then eventually dispersing while all along its nature was water. That may sound all airy-fairy, and still, the recognition of the truth of that can really, really, really help you be more at peace with being a person process, rather than getting identified with a positional brick-like self. I do want to say one thing about Mary Dolphin's question. It's 23 minutes past, so I'll take a few minutes just to speak to this. I've written a lot about basically what to do when you truly have been wronged, and so I'll kind of summarize that right here. It helps to, first of all, recognize it, and to clarify in your own mind what the facts are and what your relevant values are. And that might sound complicated. It really just means what actually really happened, and why do you care? And in that process, sometimes you clarify, eh, I wasn't wronged that much, or you realize, holy moly, I was really mistreated there. That was terrible, what happened to me. So then you have some clarity about it. That's a great place to start. Next, and along with this, it's kind of often in parallel, stand up for yourself. Take good care of yourself, is what I mean. Compassion for yourself. It hurts. I've done therapy with people for 50 years. What was I thinking? Anyway, the great honor to be able to do that and have so many conversations with people. I would say maybe 1% of the population, maybe a little more, is really caught up in their grievances about others, and I was wrong, I've been cheated, I'm mistreated. Maybe it's 10%. But the great majority of people, in my experience, are dismissive of their own wounds. They dismiss their hurt places inside because when they were young, those hurt places were dismissed, and sometimes in structural ways. Like boys, little boys who are not supposed to cry, or girls who are not supposed to be angry. So it's really important to own the wounding, and own it, and to recognize it, and to have kind of a moral witnessing of yourself. Much as it's really important to witness the wrongs that others have been done to, it's important to witness those in ourselves. And then next, we're in the question of what to do about it. Seeking allies often is really helpful. Wise allies who will walk that middle path between pouring gasoline on the fire unnecessarily, or dismissing and downplaying. Yeah, it was a little thing, why aren't you over it by now? If you find people you can talk with, that's really helpful. And people who can help you form a plan, right? So telling the truth to yourself as you see it about what really happened, bringing kindness and compassion to yourself, clarifying what you're going to do. Maybe you're going to let it go because there's nothing you can do. You can just be loving with yourself, acknowledge the wound. Some injuries we'll never have justice for, and we may be stuck with some of their consequences. That's a kind of dukkha. On the other hand, you may have opportunities to actually interact with others. Can you repair? Maybe you can't. Maybe what you need to do is to resize the relationship into a size and nature that's appropriate and safe for you with people you may still need to see, like Uncle Bob at the holiday dinner. But you're never going to talk with him again about politics or interact with him after he's had a few drinks or other things too. So that's my quick advice. When people wrong us, it's real. It's really important to deal with. And nothing I've said here about acceptance and not taking life so personally, is speaking against really standing for justice, including justice applied to yourself.