Greetings,

Wishing you a happy new year! Happy, not because it's tension free. Happy in the possibility of a year of realizing freedom from suffering around the tension. We will never exist in a world where there is no difficulty, everything works out in our favor, and life is full of good times. We will always live in a world where something is going wrong, there is stress, tension, and difficulty. This year we will be exploring the Four Noble Truths. I hope the exploration will lead you closer to the capacity to be with all the challenges in your life with greater ease and flexibility. In that ease and flexibility lies liberation.

The Four Noble Truths are the foundation of Buddha's middle way. Everything we learn in the Dhamma branches out from this understanding. This year we will spend time with each of these Truths to see if we can get at their subtleties. These Truths are not as plain as they seem. They are not pronouncements. They are not literal at all. They are complex and their luminosity is so bright we cannot see what they are pointing at. We actually have to widen our perspective to get a clearer picture of what we're looking at. Nowhere is this more true than in the First Noble Truth - there is suffering. This seems so simple. If we Just think about the idea of beginning this year. It doesn't take much to see suffering, right? But this is not the suffering Buddha was pointing towards. Buddha was pointing to something much subtler. Much harder to see. It's not that obvious as losing an election. There is something else at play that causes us to suffer. It takes a great deal of practice and perseverance to see it. In fact, you have to want to see it because our natural underlying tendency is to not see it. Our basic human brain/nervous system prevents us from seeing it. With practice, however, we begin to see something. The more we practice, the more we see. And the more we see, the less we get caught by this underlying tendency.

Lately I have been teaching on suffering (Dukkha) as a veil or film, an overlay on top of experience. I like this because it expresses more of the complexity of this truth. It's easy to see an experience as suffering. This is where we get trapped. We think if we just fix the experience, or get rid of the experience, we will end our suffering. What Buddha saw was that the experience is not the suffering. Our suffering is coming from how we are relating to the experience. We all know this. We hear it all the time. Every talk on Dukkha says this. And still as soon as we experience something difficult, we try to fix the experience. A friend of mine helped me see this in a very poignant way. Two or three days after the election she called me to share a realization she was having. Her partner had been diagnosed with a terminal illness the day after the election. She was in this weird place of worrying more about her partner than the election. She was upset about the election, but it didn't seem significant because of her partner's diagnosis. I realized that she did not have the same veil over the election I had. Compared to her partner's illness, the election was nothing. It doesn't mean the election means nothing. The significance of the election is based solely on our individual projections around its importance.

This is an important subtlety to comprehend within the First Noble Truth. It is what is ennobling about this Truth. We only suffer in relation to the significance we give to situations. The more we don't like it, the more we suffer. The more we push against it, the more we suffer. And the more we try to make it something other than what it is, the more we suffer. It's not like we won't do this. We're human beings. Our very makeup creates this type of tension. My friend may not be suffering about the election, but she was definitely suffering about her partner's situation. This is what Buddha was trying to get us to see when he said, "Birth is stressful, aging is stressful, death is stressful; sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair are stressful; association with the unbeloved is stressful, separation from the loved is stressful, not getting what is wanted is stressful. In short, the five clinging-aggregates are stressful."

In all of the above situations, an overlay, veil, or film, co-arises with the experience. This overlay, veil, or film, or whatever you want to call it, is the definition of Dukkha. This is what the Buddha is pointing to when he says, "There is Dukkha." Our job is to try to see that overlay. That's what this month's picture is pointing to. Can you see how there is something to be seen, but our view is out of focus. This is the way difficult experiences are perceived by the mind. What we see looks blurry. But in the picture there are also some little water droplets that are very clear. This is how Dukkha helps us see the ambiguity of our perception around difficult experiences. Dukkha can be known as clearly as we can see the little water droplets. It requires that we shift our perception from trying to make out the picture to seeing the water droplets themselves. When we look at the water droplets themselves, the picture itself is also beautiful even in its blurriness. I hope it's not just me and you can see this, too. This is what we're going to try to see over the course of the month. If we are willing to use the little water droplets of tension and irritation and frustration, it can help us see the blurriness of our perception. I hope you'll join us in this exploration.

With a deep bow,

Tuere