These Basic Buddhist Teachings are for right in the heart of life, today in a hospital room with my wife, the night before surgery. Times like these are the true proving ground.

This Practice has no purpose or value… and it is at moments like this one that its value and purpose are crystal clear.

In life, there’s sickness, old age, death and loss… other very hard times… But that’s not why ‘Life is Suffering‘. Not at all, said the Buddha.

(Click through to watch today’s talk, and to “sit-a-long.”)

Our “dissatisfaction,” “disappointment,”‘ “unease” and “frustration” — Dukkha — arises as a state of mind, as our demands and wishes for how things “should be” or “if only would be for life to be content” differ from”the way things are.” Your “self” wishes this world to be X, yet this world is not X. That wide gap of “self” and “not self” is the source of Dukkha.
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What’s more, even happiness can be a source of Dukkha if we cling to the happy state, demand that it stay, are attached to good news, material successes, pleasures and the like.. refusing the way life may otherwise go. That is also the “self” placing judgments and demands on life.

Fortunately, the Buddha provided the medicine for this disease of dis-ease: The Eightfold Path (which we will talk about in our next ‘Buddha-Basics’).

Oh, no amount of Practice can make times like these — sitting in a hospital room, in pain and awaiting the surgeon’s knife — fun. It is natural to worry too. Yet all is revealed as somehow okay: okay beyond okay, allowing all, yielding, flowing with the flowing, beyond worry (even in the heart of worry), resistance gone… letting it be.

The gap is closed. There is peace.

Today’s Sit-A-Long video follows. Remember: recording ends soon after the beginning bells; a sitting time of 20 to 35 minutes is recommended.

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