Dear Friends,

Welcome to summer! I hope you are able to enjoy some more ease during these longer days. This past week, I was part of a couple of small online and in person retreats. In one retreat I heard a metaphor that stuck with me that may be helpful to practice with. Here goes…

Our suffering (our fear, anger, FOMO, jealousy, etc.) can be thought of like a cake made of many ingredients. A cake might be made of flour, eggs, sugar, vanilla, etc, and our suffering might be made of thoughts, perceptions, beliefs, etc.

If you leave out the flour or the sugar from the cake batter, it will no longer become a cake. In the same way, if we remove one ingredient from our suffering it will no longer be suffering.

To practice this, we need to look deeply into our suffering so we can clearly see its recipe- the causes and conditions that allow it to survive. We might think we know why we suffer, but if we look more closely when we are calm and undistracted, we might see different ingredients. We might see that we have wrong perceptions about the situation, unhelpful habits of thinking and acting, or subtle beliefs that we or our loved ones are permanent or completely separate from each other.

The Buddha taught that we can transform our suffering if we understand it enough. He said, “The moment you understand the nature of your ill-being, the moment you know how your ill-being has come to be, you are already on the path of release from it.” (Samyutta Nikaya 247)

If we don’t want cake, we can remove the sugar. If we don’t want despair, we can remove an ingredient such as our rumination, grasping, misperception, or negative thinking.

Simple but not easy. Let me know what you think. I love getting email from you so please let me know how your practice is going.