Thich Nhat Hanh writes: “The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.”
I spent years doing exactly that. Waiting. Waiting until things were handled, until the wreckage was cleared, until I had enough distance from my own history to feel like I had the right to be okay. Suffering was what I was in. Peace was where I was trying to get. And the gap between them — that was where I lived, and it was large.
The First Noble Truth in Buddhist teaching is dukkha — often translated as suffering, but more precisely something closer to unsatisfactoriness, the constant friction of existence. Not as punishment. Not as evidence that something has gone wrong. As the basic texture of a human life. The teaching isn’t “suffering is bad and you should fix it.” It’s “suffering is real and you need to learn how to be with it.”
That distinction changed how I understood what I was doing on the cushion. I wasn’t meditating to make the suffering stop. I was meditating to change my relationship to it — to stop running from it, stop numbing it, stop treating it as the obstacle between me and a life worth living.
Bréné Brown’s research makes this concrete in a different register: “We cannot selectively numb emotions. When we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.” This is what the drinking was doing. I wasn’t just numbing the grief and the shame and the free-floating anxiety. I was numbing everything. The solution to suffering was also the elimination of joy, connection, genuine pleasure — all of it muted, all of it behind glass.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, who built the MBSR program at UMass, describes mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.” That non-judgmental piece is where suffering and the practice meet. You can be with the suffering without making it mean something about your worth, without making it a verdict on your future, without treating it as the whole truth about who you are.
Recovery taught me a version of this that landed before the formal language did: I am not a victim of my suffering. I can feel it, name it, and choose how I meet it. Meditation gave me the tools to actually do that — to isolate the thought that used to paralyze me, see it clearly, and choose differently. Not always. Not immediately. But more often, with more practice, with more time on the cushion.
Suffering is the curriculum. Not the obstacle to the course. The course itself.
