Here’s an excerpt.

For a few years, I ran a men’s personal development blog (this one) where I basically coached men how to step up. After the first year, instead of gaining momentum as a great resource for men, it kinda turned into my personal story. I shared very openly my process, my meltdowns, and my insights about the spiritual path.

Recently, I had a guy comment on my blog in a way that was reminiscent of my own view a couple of years ago.

He wrote:

“Jayson I’m an infrequent visitor to your site. Not that the content is not worthwhile, just that I’ve been on a bit of a quest myself. What I’ve found is much more than peace. Much more than ‘emptiness’. It’s filling, completeness and deep understanding of how things work. It didn’t require a special tea, any type of penitence, or whatever ‘painful’ rites you’d like to perform.

It’s Kabbalah and it’s the most freeing and complete system to achieve understanding you’ll ever find. Look into it and save yourself and your family the pain and uncertainty of imitation spirituality. Peace and good luck.”

In other words, “My path is better than your path.”

Deeper translation? “I’m better than you.” Even deeper translation? “I feel inadequate and worthless and I need to prove to you that I’m really not.”

Read more here.

Because of this, many of us attempt to feel better through a variety of means. We seek to get out of the pain, move away from it, avoid it or even stuff it. At the same time we push away our pain, we also seek pleasure. We seek whatever will make us feel better.

So, we do things that seem to minimize our pain by adding pleasure to our life. We eat food that may not be the best for our body but it tastes soooo good. Or, if we are having a bad day, we hit the bars with some friends to cheer us up. We might even take stimulants or medication to help us feel better.

Mainstream marketing and advertisements do their best to address your pain points and promise you a remedy, or they will hit the pleasure seeker in you that will buy whatever makes you feel better.

In Buddhism there exists a great teaching about the nature of life. These teachings are called the 4 noble truths. Rather than get into a lengthy discourse on Buddhism and its teachings, I will just mention these in layman’s terms. If you want to go further, resources at are the bottom.

4 Noble Truths and How to apply them to your Life

Truth 1

The Buddha taught that in life we suffer and struggle. No one is above this fundamental truth. Look around the globe or watch the news. Suffering is everywhere. To pretend otherwise, is to discount the truth of life. We all suffer.

Application

Stop pretending that everything is either “great” or “miserable.” Look around at reality and see for yourself. Acknowledge that you and others suffer.

Truth 2.

Our wanting to avoid our own suffering and the suffering around us by seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, causes the suffering. In other words, suffering starts and grows by our own desire to get rid of it.

Application

Ask yourself if you are a pain avoider or pleasure seeker, or both? Get to know the ways in which you avoid your own suffering and discomfort.

Pain Avoiders

In my work with hundreds of men, the common theme is that men are too scared to feel their emotional pain and avoid feeling their feelings. They will hardly wince at physical pain, brave wars, corporate greed and beat each other to a pulp, but emotional feelings are “off limits” for most men.

If you can handle intense physical pain, why not engage your emotional pain or the emotional pain of others? Be fearless about feeling what is painful in your life. On the other side of feeling great emotional pain is perhaps the pleasure you seek. Again, try it and see for yourself.

Realize that the more you push away pain, the more you are likely to suffer.

Pleasure seekers

If you are always trying to feel better and chasing “positive” feelings such as happiness or joy, stop. Stop and notice what happens when you stop. Just sit there and be with it.

For example, you might be a dopamine junkie. You might seek pleasure through extreme sports like I did, or you might have certain addictions that give you a “rush.” Ask yourself, who would I be if I didn’t keep chasing this feeling?

If you really feel hooked by this one, I suggest finding a mentor to help you through it. Unless of course, you would rather chase that fleeting feeling.

Truth 3.

Suffering lessens when we can give up our desire to get rid of it. Freedom is possible.

Application

By you relating to your pain and catching yourself as you attempt to avoid it, the great irony is that you may feel better at the end of the day. It is through being a yes to our experience (including pain) that we become more and more fulfilled in life.

This does not mean dwell on your pain and collapse into it. Suffering becomes a vehicle for our own personal growth and evolution.

Truth 4.

The way to end suffering is the eightfold path and the path of ethical conduct, meditation and mindfulness.

Application

You don’t have to become Buddhist or even meditate to cease the suffering in your life.

However, choose to engage some kind of mindfulness and self-awareness practice. The more you get in touch with your heart and come into harmony with your deepest self, the less you will suffer and the less you will get hooked by the suffering around you.

It is not that you stop feeling the suffering around you. Rather, you feel it deeply and you are impacted by it greatly. Yet, the response is to open to it and face it fearlessly, rather than shrink, contract and run away.

Consider the possibility that suffering exists mainly because of our disconnected relationship to our own suffering. If this is true, the work then, is to engage your suffering, relate to it, get to know it, feel it and over time it will dissipate.

Similar Posts:

No Pain, No Gain

Feel Your Feelings

References:

Reggie Ray: Indestructible Truth:The Living Spirituality of Tibetan Buddhism.

Walpola Sri Rahula: What the Buddha Taught

Wikipedia: The Four Noble Truths and The Eightfold Path.

Pico Iyer from the New York Times writes…

It’s only the clouds of short-sightedness or ignorance, the teachers from the Dalai Lama’s tradition suggest, that prevent us from seeing that our essential nature, whether we’re Buddhist or not, is blue sky.

Here’s an excerpt from the NY Times article…

“Dream — nothing!” is one of the many things I’ve heard the 14th Dalai Lama say to large audiences that seem to startle the unprepared. Just before I began an onstage conversation with him at New York Town’s Hall this spring, he told me, “If I had magical powers, I’d never need an operation!” and broke into guffaws as he thought of the three-hour gallbladder operation he’d been through last October, weeks after being in hospital for another ailment. For a Buddhist, after all, our power lies nowhere but ourselves.

We can’t change the world except insofar as we change the way we look at the world — and, in fact, any one of us can make that change, in any direction, at any moment. The point of life, in the view of the Dalai Lama, is happiness, and that lies within our grasp, our untapped potential, with every breath.

Easy for him to say, you might scoff. He’s a monk, he meditates for four hours as soon as he wakes up and he’s believed by his flock to be an incarnation of a god.* Yet when you think back on his circumstances, you recall that he was made ruler of a large and fractious nation when he was only 4 years old. He was facing a civil war of sorts in Lhasa when he was just 11, and when he was 15, he was made full political leader and had to start protecting his country against Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, leaders of the world’s largest (and sometimes least tractable) nation.

This spring marked the completion of half a century for him in exile, trying to guide and serve 6 million Tibetans he hasn’t seen in 50 years, and to rally 150,000 or so exiled Tibetans who have in most cases never seen Tibet. This isn’t an obvious recipe for producing a vividly contagious optimism.

Yet in 35 years of talking to the Dalai Lama, and covering him everywhere from Zurich to Hiroshima, as a non-Buddhist, skeptical journalist, I’ve found him to be as deeply confident, and therefore sunny, as anyone I’ve met. And I’ve begun to think that his almost visible glow does not come from any mysterious or unique source. Indeed, mysteries and rumors of his own uniqueness are two of the things that cause him most instantly to erupt into warm laughter. The Dalai Lama I’ve seen is a realist (which is what makes his optimism the more impressive and persuasive). And he’s as practical as the man he calls his “boss.”

The Buddha generally presented himself as more physician than metaphysician: if an arrow is sticking out of your

read the rest here…

For more amazing stories about the Dalai Lama, follow this link.

What is your relationship to your own suffering and the suffering around you? Do you run? Hide? Or turn toward what is uncomfortable? Stay tuned for future post on what we as men can learn from teachers like the Dalai Lama and Buddhism in general.