Oakville Zen Meditation
The knots of suffering
To be happy or even serene is not to be free from suffering, it is to suffer less.
If we cannot transform the pain within ourselves, serenity would not be possible.
Many people look for happiness outside themselves, but true happiness must come from inside of us. Our culture tells us that happiness comes from having a lot of money, power, and a high position in society. But if you observe carefully, you will see that many rich powerful, and famous people are not that happy because the search never ended.
According to the Buddha’s teachings, the most basic condition for happiness is freedom from our attachments to unachieved desires including expectations, negative feelings, and delusion.
Called “mental formations” by the Buddha, he considers these formations as poisons. As long as these poisons are still active in our hearts and mind by means of attachments, serenity cannot be possible because they always trigger attachments.
In order to be free from our poisons, we have to practice awareness of our attachments, whether we are Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, or whatever.
The Knots of internal suffering:
In our consciousness and sub-consciousness, we have many attachment-based suffering from multiple origins already mentioned. We call these attachments, knots.
When attachment to desire, expectation, hatred, and delusions is creating suffering,
an internal knot is created in our subconscious and conscious mind. If you don’t know how to undo the internal knot, it will stay there for a long time with the power to control us and dictate our behavior. Every one of us has multiple knots that we need to take care of. With the practice of meditation, we can untangle these knots and experience transformation and healing.
Most knots are unpleasant but many of them are also pleasant.
Here are a few so-called “pleasant knots”:
When you taste, hear or see something pleasant, then that pleasure can become a strong internal “feel good “knot. When the object of our pleasure disappears, we miss it and we begin searching for it. We spend a lot of time and energy trying to experience pleasure again and again, more and more. We cannot get it off your mind and these “pleasure knots” are controlling us, depriving us of our freedom. Pleasure becomes ........suffering.
Falling in love is also a big internal knot. Once we are in deep love, we only think of the other person and we cannot do too much but think of the subject of our love. Falling in love is a beautiful and wonderful thing as long as it does not become an internal knot such as worries and even fear of losing this precious gift.
Pleasant or unpleasant, both kinds of knots feed our suffering and take away our serenity. That is why we should guard our bodies and our mind and be more mindful about our knots.
How to untangle our suffering knots?
Suffering cannot be prevented, only be minimized.
Step#1: Having a good understanding of the sources of our suffering either from pleasant and unpleasant origin: unachieved desires including the search for pleasure, expectation, power, money, control, hatred, and illusion.
Step#2: To realize that all of them are creating attachment, which is the core of suffering.
Step#3: Paying attention to our attachments in a mindful way that is thru simple observation
w/o trying to control if not eradicate them which is impossible.
Final words:
Is suffering necessary? yes and no.
Who wants to suffer? No one, besides the masochistic personalities.
Yes, it is necessary because if you had not suffered as you have, there will be no depth inside yourself, no humility, and no compassion to yourself and to others. Thank you
