So we suffer in life when we want things to be other than as they are.
We expect people and things to behave the way we want them to. When they don’t, we feel resistance. Wanting or not-wanting leads us to react. We believe that when something pleasant or unpleasant happens, it is natural to react with craving or aversion. Through inquiry we drop these beliefs and unhelpful ways of responding to what life brings us, instead finding more equanimity with whatever is happening.
At subtler levels, underlying our whole experience of life is restlessness and distraction, which arises from our wish to fix things so that they become satisfactory, permanent and substantial. We resist the idea of things being unsatisfactory, impermanent (and sometimes the idea of them being permanent) and we resist insubstantiality. This leads to our suffering, but to quote the Borg in Star Trek ‘Resistance is futile’.
After restlessness has stopped arising, we look for what we have ignored and see through to a deeper awakening.
Through this inquiry, we learn that there is no such thing as always feeling good, and then find peace and contentment with this.
