Desire and Suffering Often Hold Hands

Understanding that desire and suffering go hand in hand was a stepping stone for me.

I do know that the overwhelming desire to have my son around, to watch him sing, laugh, and grow, was and is the source of much of my suffering. But can one learn to detach from that desire and move forward? Keep in mind the distinction between eliminating the attachment to the desire and the desire itself. One can still have the desire to hold their loved ones’ hands again or see their smile, hear their laughter, and so on, but it is the need and attachment to that desire that causes a lot of our pain.

If you’re reading this blog, you’re mindful enough to at least care about your mental well-being. In all likelihood, you’ve lost somebody dear to you and are suffering in some way from their loss. Or you may be embarking on a new journey and want to know how to proceed most effectively.

You may very well feel your loss is so acute that nobody could feel the depths of darkness the way you do. I can assure you that anybody who’s lost someone dear to them also suffers in their own darkness. You are not alone.

When researching the section on Buddhism for Dance with Angels, one simple yet profound insight  resonated with me. It came from my interpretation of an analogy in one of Phillip Moffitt’s many books, titled Dancing with Life.^[1]  In his book, Moffitt writes about the Four Noble Truths—the centrepiece of the Buddha’s teachings—and how to incorporate the insights they represent in dealing with the suffering in your life. Here’s an analogy for how to view pain, grief, suffering, and pleasure that I find helpful to remember that:

  Life is a dance, and you must dance with it.

 For me, the visualisation of dancing in tune with a partner, moving with them and not fighting them, made it easier to understand one of the messages of Moffitt’s book—we must move with the ebb and flow of life, the pleasure and pain, in ways that don’t define and control us. I longed to free myself from being controlled and defined by the grief I felt at the loss of my son—but could I do it?