We living beings are trapped in the cycle of Existence known as Samsara.
In Samsara, we wander aimlessly & experience unbearable Suffering - day & night, year after year, life after life.
There are times in our Lives when we Wish we could Change the ending of the Story. Sometimes we Lose what we Care about, we are Separated from those we Love, our bodies Fail us as we get older, we feel Helpless or Hurt or our Lives just seem to be slipping away.
These are all aspects of Dukkha.
Dukkha means Suffering, Discontent, Unsatisfactoriness, Uneasiness, Anxiety, Disappointment, Mental Stress, Emotional Pain, etc.
Dukkha refers to the Psychological Experience of the profound fact that everything is impermanent, ungraspable & not really knowable.
On some level, we all understand this.
All the things we have, we know we don’t really have.
All the things we see, we are not entirely seeing.
This is the nature of things, yet we think the opposite.
We think that we can Know & Possess our Lives, our Loves, our Identities & even our Possessions.
We can’t.
The gap between the Reality & the basic human approach to life is Dukkha, an experience of basic Anxiety or Frustration.
We keep thinking that if we just fix this or fix that, tweak here or there, we can avoid it.
We think that if we were smarter, prettier, wealthier, more powerful, living somewhere else, younger, older, male, female, with different parents - you name it - things would be Different.
But things are not Different; they are as bad as they seem.
Since it is unrealistic to hope for a Stress-Free life & that would not be all that good in any case, it makes more sense to Learn how to Deal with the Stresses that inevitably arise.
Whenever there is Pain of any kind.- the Pain of aggression, grieving, loss, irritation, resentment, jealousy, indigestion, physical pain - if you really look into that, you can find out for yourself that behind the Pain there is always something we are Attached to.
Attachment Leads to Suffering.
There is always something we are Holding On to.
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