“Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.” Richard Hooper shares this quote from modern Buddhist wisdom in his beautiful book, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna and Lao Tzu: The Parallel Sayings. (Sanctuary Publications, Inc., Sedona, AZ, 2007.) Hooper continues with this insight into suffering:

“For most of us, most of the time, it’s hard to remember that pleasure and pain always go hand in hand. We forget that we cannot have one without the other. So we seek to maximize pleasure and do our best to avoid pain. But the great masters knew that life doesn’t work that way. Everything in our universe comes to us in pairs of opposites, and the opposites are always changing from one to the other. Pain replaces pleasure, pleasure replaces pain, over and over again, endlessly. Nothing in the material universe ever remains the same for long. But when we finally understand this truth at the most profound level, we have a chance to change the rules of the game. Buddha taught that there is a way out of suffering, and that way is to eliminate desire. If we can retrain the mind so that it no longer craves, so that it no longer prefers one thing over another – so that good and bad, pleasure and pain, hot and cold, love and hate are all the same to us, then suffering ceases of its own accord.”

So how do we retrain our minds? How do we unlearn our tendency to prefer one thing over another? Take a moment to reflect on your preferences. Then reflect on how you respond when you feel pain on any level – physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual. Do you run from the pain? Do you reach for ice cream or turn on the television?

When we avoid our pains, we actually prolong them. When we face and embrace our pains, with willingness to go through them, we heal ourselves on all levels. But since most of us have learned to avoid pain, we have to retrain our minds. We retrain our minds through regular, daily spiritual practices. In my new book, Radiance Rising: Spiritual Practices for Daily Living, I describe the daily practices that have helped me to retrain my mind. Written from my perspective as a raja yogini, this pocket book describes basic practices that anyone – of any faith – could apply to their own life. The most important practice that I explain in the book is cultivating the witness.

We can practice cultivating the witness during our sitting meditation sessions and also throughout our busy daily lives. When we cultivate the witness, that objective part of ourselves that simply watches everything we think, say, and do, we learn to accept ourselves exactly as we are in each moment. We learn to accept the full spectrum of all of our emotions. This acceptance teaches us to fully love ourselves when we are experiencing joy and when we are experiencing sorrow. As our witnessing capacity expands, our self-love grows, and as our self-love grows, we identify less with our pains, so we suffer less.

The more we practice witnessing everything that is arising in our beings, the more we begin to remember who we truly are, underneath all the layers of who we aren’t! This is a choice. We choose to keep remembering who we truly are. And we can choose to be happy no matter what temporary state is passing through us.

Happiness is not just something that “happens” to us if we are lucky. We can decide to be happy, and if we put for the effort to be happy, then we will gradually become more and more happy.

What effort are you willing to put forth to achieve happiness? Are you willing to sit in meditation at least once each day for twenty minutes or longer? Are you willing to watch your thoughts as an ongoing practice? Are you willing to love yourself no matter what pains you are going through?

These are important questions for us all to ask ourselves. In this time of rapid change on our sweet planet earth, we can each do our small part to help raise the consciousness of our human species. Since we are all connected in one continuous web of energy and vibration, the choices we make for ourselves really do affect everyone else. Let us each choose to be happy through all the joys and sorrows of life. Let us each spread that happiness to all the beings in all the worlds.

May all beings everywhere know Peace and Happiness.

Om Shanti (Peace), 

Yogini Tejaswini

Buddha statue photo by beggs – CC license