Two good ideas from Phillip Moffitt
We are reading Dancing with Life by Phillip Moffitt. He owned Esquire magazine and worked hard and successfully at the business. Something in him required him to sell the magazine and bail out of that life. He became a Buddhist teacher and meditation instructor. He says that new life has suited him very well.
There are four well-known statements that form the basis of the Buddha’s teachings:
- life always includes suffering,
- suffering occurs when we are trapped with an event or a pain or a disappointment we deeply don’t want
- we can let go of suffering
- with right living and mindfulness (awareness), suffering can be abandoned
Moffitt discusses each of these using a background of decades of personal practice and experience teaching others. He has made two points that have struck us so far.
He has quite a bit of experience that people, especially Americans, have trouble admitting they are suffering when they are. Why would that be? In a way, it is shameful. It is an admission of defeat. For some, it is like the old Protestant idea that prosperity is a sign of God’s blessing so if you admit to being impecunious, you are admitting that God frowns on you. Moffitt goes out of his way to stress that suffering, from little forms such as irritation with a tv ad to big forms such as incurable debilitating disease, is always guaranteed to occur in life. So, it is going to pop up. Further, and this is important, it is ENNOBLING. So, Lynn and I are going around trying to outdo each other with a list of irritations we are each suffering and being ennobled by.
His 2nd point is that the complete facing and being with suffering is essential to letting it go. Part of that fully facing suffering is a close and intimate answer to the question “How does it feel?”. In an American movie, that question is asked by a therapist trying to find out what emotion is registering inside a client. But Moffitt and the Buddha advise a different interpretation. They direct us to answer in an extremely detailed and body-based way. What physical feelings does the suffering create? Where are they in the body? What are the feelings like? Steady, intermittent, sharp, dull, cyclic? Putting the attention as directly as possible on the signals of suffering is surprisingly powerful for passing through and beyond them. We have tried this and are impressed.
