In what known as the "Second Noble Truth," the Buddha taught that there is a cause for our suffering. To begin with, he taught that there is a difference between the simple experience of what I will call, "pain," and the more confused experience of what I will call "suffering."

Pain is unavoidable, as we saw in the last blog entry. Being alive means that we will experience the pain of illness, of death, of loss, and of change. Those things come along with being a human being. They are not the result of making some kind of mistake. If we cut our knee, it hurts. If we lose a loved one, we feel the pain of loss. There's no psychology or spiritual path that can actually remove such direct experiences of pain.

However, we don't usually simply feel pain. What we do, instead, is we have all sorts of reactions to the pain. We might try to ignore it or distract ourselves. We might get quite busy in our effort to avoid the experience of pain.

For example, the other day I woke up with a headache. I quickly began to run a series of thoughts about that pain. It was the day before the Thanksgiving holiday, and I was about to leave town for a much anticipated break. "Oh no!" I thought, "I can't be getting sick now." I began to feel that my throat was sore and could this be a fever beginning to settle in? Was I getting the flu? I began giving myself a sort of pep-talk. "It will be okay, even if we have to cancel the holiday plans, we can have a nice dinner here." Then, my mind went into overdrive: "Maybe it the H1N1 virus! I could get really sick. There hasn't been any vaccine available in the area, and besides they are not making it available to people my age. That's not fair! I could die!"

I am actually quite good at this sort of thing. I kept it going for awhile. My headache got worse; my throat began to be tight; my mood became charged with irritation and then fear. Both body and mind were uncomfortable.

Then, there was a bit of a gap in my busy mindstream. I realized that I was creating the whole drama by myself. When I turned my attention to what I was actually experiencing, I discovered that there was a bit of tightness in my neck and tension in my forehead. My throat, once I was willing to actually feel it, was actually quite fine. A quick check in the mirror with a flashlight revealed that there was no redness, no swelling. There was no reason at all to be thinking I had to flu and was about to keel over. There was no reason for fear; there was no reason for irritation. There was a bit of discomfort, but I had been making myself feel a good deal worse with my reactions-and over-reactions-to the straightforward experience of my headache.

My headache scenario illustrates the difference between "pain" and "suffering." Pain refers to the sensory experience of the tightness in my neck, the tension in my forehead, and any other sensations that accompanied the headache. Suffering refers to all of my reactions that made the pain seem worse than it was. The Buddha taught that we cause ourselves much unnecessary distress by creating suffering.

We create suffering when we struggle to avoid feeling pain. We might, for example, create a whole big story about how terrible things are, as I did with my headache. I could have enlisted the support of others for my story by complaining about my bad luck. I could have blamed someone or something: maybe it was the fault of someone at work who had come in despite having flu symptoms and contaminated all of us! What nerve! How inconsiderate!

Or, I might have tried to distract myself and pretended that there was nothing painful going on. Instead of just noticing what was happening and maybe taking an aspirin, I might have denied my experience and gotten caught up in packing for my trip or bemoaning my lack of the right clothes to take with me. I could have begun to run around mindlessly doing a last minute load of laundry or begun ironing something I didn't even need.

I'm sure you get the idea, and you can probably think of times in your own life when you tried to push away the pain of something small like my headache or something much bigger like a bad relationship or the loss of a much needed job.

If it had been my habit, I might have tried to drown my distress by having a few stiff drinks. Of course, a habit of turning to alcohol or other addictive substances could cause even more confusion and suffering. The ways we push away experience can build on each other and create bigger and bigger messes for ourselves and for others around us.

The Buddha taught that when we try to get away from pain, we create much more. When we ignore our simple and direct experience, we suffer.

In therapy, my clients and I explore how they generate unnecessary suffering. For example, "Grady" lights up a cigarette when he feels lonely. It is such a strong habit, he doesn't even notice himself reaching for the cigarette. He knows, of course, that it is bad for his health, and yet he keeps creating unnecessary unhealthy consequences for his body (he has a chronic cough and tires easily), his emotions (he is ashamed that he smokes and tries to hide it from others), and his thoughts (he heaps self-aggressive judgments on himself for not overcoming this "weakness").

Learning how to stay present with the pain of loneliness, and discovering that he can tolerate it, is part of Grady's path to re-discovering his brilliant sanity. If he were to bring an aggressive attitude to stopping smoking, it could just backfire. Like many other smokers, he can say, "Quitting is easy; I've done it a million times." Instead, we are exploring together ways to touch his loneliness without becoming lost in it, gradually bringing curiosity to the actual moment-to-moment experience of smoking, acknowledging the harm he is causing himself and others with smoking, and exploring the possibility of treating himself with gentleness.

Next time we will look at another way we create suffering: hanging on to a mistaken sense of ourselves, a false identity that obscures our true nature of brilliant sanity.