reading

“How can we find happiness and peace—right now, right here? In her engaging, thought-provoking book Tiny Buddha, Lori Deschene explores this enormous question to help readers grapple with challenges like money, love, pain, control, and meaning, in order to find greater happiness.”

“Lori is one of a kind. Her amazing heart and wisdom shine through in everything she writes! I am a HUGE fan of Tiny Buddha, and I'm constantly inspired by Lori and her work.”

“There's nothing tiny about the extra-large dose of awesome stuffed into Lori's writing. Read it and feel good about the world.”

—Neil Pasricha, founder and author of 1000 Awesome Things and The Book of Awesome

“Few people in our time have more passionately or more creatively applied wisdom teachings to a new digital generation than Lori Deschene. I am continually inspired by her writing, and also by her sincere dedication to learning, growth, and wisdom. I feel tremendously fortunate to have had the chance to get to know her work through Tiny Buddha, and to know her as a person. Both embody the same essential truths.”

“Lori Deschene doesn't claim to be anybody's guru. But it's that lack of pretense and her total candor—how she tells her own often-wild story without flinching—that is so magnetic, inviting a sense of ease with our own wrinkles, too, and fostering a sense of personal possibility. As she asks: Are you ready to be free?”

“I spent months retweeting posts from a mystery handle called @tinybuddha. I wasn't the only one: Hundreds of thousands of people followed the daily messages. I was intrigued and made it a point to meet the woman behind the message. Today, Lori Deschene is a friend and fellow author who spreads truth and inspiration throughout the twittersphere, her blog, and now her new book! Lori has shifted the energy of the Internet with her loving daily posts and now she is sharing more with the world through her incredible book!”

—Gabrielle Bernstein, author of Add More —ing to Your Life and Spirit Junkie

“Tiny Buddha is a moving and insightful synthesis of evocative stories and ancient wisdom applied to modern life. A great read!”

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel / Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

Certain names and defining characteristics have been changed here to protect people's privacy. ISBN: 978-1-57324-506-7

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992 (R1997).

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION

In March of 2007, when Twitter exploded at the South by Southwest Festival, more than 60,000 tweets addressed the question, “What are you doing?” At the time, I was certain I'd sooner post my organs for auction on eBay than choose a Twitter handle. I didn't see any benefit in using technology to narrate my life as it happened. Why would I want to update my social circle—let alone strangers—on my most mundane daily activities? I assumed that if I joined, I'd bore my friends with TMI and have less to discuss when I saw them in person—they'd already know I ate a Rice Krispies Treat at ten, practiced yoga at lunch, and seriously considered cutting my bangs at four. I thought I couldn't live mindfully if I traced my steps with a digital bread-crumb trail. If I did use the web to share random details about my everyday life, I'd want to answer a far more interesting question than, “What are you doing?”

In 2008 I realized how badly I'd underestimated that question. What was I doing? I was writing for a series of websites that didn't mean anything to me on a personal level. I was trying to figure out how to be an independent, valuable part of society after years of crawling, one inch at a time, out of self-loathing and depression—an ascent that felt as knuckle-draggingly prolonged as humans' evolution from apes. I was for all intents and purposes doing a lot better, but I was not feeling better about the things I was doing. And I was drowning in spiritual texts and self-help books looking for answers everywhere outside myself. What I wasn't doing was living an empowered life, driven by my passions and guided by my gut instincts.

After years of obsessing over who I was, it felt empowering to shift my focus to what I was doing. Suddenly I was considering that maybe Twitter wasn't as superficial as I thought it had to be. It could be like tofu and take the flavor of whatever it's marinated in—and I could mix it up as my taste buds demanded. That's the beauty of Twitter: each tweeter decides which questions to answer, and they can be as helpful and meaningful as you make them. Asking the questions that shape our lives and exploring potential solutions—now that was something worth doing.

I had lots of questions to answer: What makes a person happy? How can you live a meaningful life? How do you move forward after a poor decision or disappointment that eats away at your sense of possibility? How can you push yourself out of your comfort zone and live the life you dream about? How can you find a sense of security in a world with so many unknowns? The list was endless, really.

No matter what religion we follow, what politics we support, what family we were born into, or where we've placed our roots, we all deal with universal problems. Regardless of our differences, we all live our lives around the same questions. How we answer them dictates the choices we'll make and what kind of person we'll be from moment to moment. Some answers are clichés that look great on paper but don't actually breathe when we inflate them and try to find a pulse. Others seem implausible and yet make a world of sense when we step inside them and wrap them around our circumstances. And others still can feel absolute for what seems like an eternity until life cross-examines them and reminds us how fragile most answers are.

Was I merely regurgitating words that felt good or feeling good about doing something with them?

The reality is there are very few concrete, one-size-fits-all answers to the big questions. According to Socrates, accepting that is the foundation to true wisdom. There's so much we can't know, understand, or predict in life. Yet if we learn to listen to ourselves and then to stop listening long enough to simply be in the world, open and available, the answers can seem so clear—answer, really. The real answer is that there are an infinite number of possibilities that we can explore to be happy, connected, engaged, and free. The simultaneous lack and abundance of answers is the answer.

Tiny Buddha evolved from that idea—the prospect of exploring different possibilities and then doing something with them so we can learn for ourselves what's right for each of us.

They say we teach what we need to learn, and this has been true for me. When I started tweeting a daily quote through @tinybuddha, I addressed the questions that felt most paralyzing in my world. I looked for quotes about letting go of stress and anxiety because I'd carried so much around for years it oozed from my skin, like a little too much garlic. I read countless books, highlighter in hand, looking for insights about being happy in the present because I'd spent so much time obsessing over the past and worrying over the future that I disbelieved it was possible to liberate the now. Once upon a time, I thought mindfulness was a comforting illusion—something spoon-fed to me like Santa, the American Dream, and free lunches.

After a year of sharing these simple ideas in a one-day-at-a-time format, with the @tinybuddha follower count growing into the thousands (now more than two hundred thousand), I reassessed: What was I doing? Was I merely regurgitating words that felt good or feeling good about doing something with them?

I considered that maybe lots of other people just like me were sitting at their computers wondering if they felt proud of how they answered the question, “What are you doing?” Reading an inspiring quote doesn't guarantee inspired action, particularly in an information-overloaded world where many of us spend our days inertly glued to technology. Sometimes when we gorge ourselves on meaningful words, we fall into an intention coma—too overwhelmed by other people's thoughts to identify the right choices for ourselves.

So I developed TinyBuddha.com in September 2009, where anyone can contribute tips and stories about wisdom in everyday life. Since then, I've watched a community grow from one to more than I ever could have imagined (more than three million unique visits to the website and more than fifty thousand Facebook and two hundred thousand Twitter followers), all of us looking to learn and share wisdom—people of all ages and backgrounds from all over the globe united by the same sense of uncertainty and a determination to thrive regardless.

That's what brought me to this book: a fascination with the questions that connect us and the wisdom—conventional or otherwise—that guides the decisions we make each day.

WHAT YOU'LL GET FROM THIS BOOK

Nearly one thousand people responded when I began asking life's hardest questions on Twitter, planning to create a collaborative book. As I read through their responses, I realized the answers fell into distinct categories of ideas. While there were occasionally responses that didn't parallel anyone else's, for the most part, the tweets grouped themselves into sections.

I didn't influence the responses to fit an agenda; I shaped my exploration around the suggestions in the tweets. Just like friends of Tiny Buddha in all its forms have guided TinyBuddha.com, their insights form the backbone of this book. Since many of the tweets were quite similar, I chose a handful that aligned with each shared perspective. From there, I dug through the archives of my memories to weigh the ideas against my own experiences and then dived into books and articles that shed further light on these ideas.

Throughout each section, you'll find a number of tips and exercises to help you take action on what you've read. Now, I never do exercises as I read a book—not even when an author writes, “I know you probably don't usually do exercises in books, but please do these!” So I have a different suggestion for you: Highlight the ones that seem useful to you, and when you find yourself in a relevant situation in life, come back to them and take action then.

I'm not a huge fan of vague, flowery, New Age jargon, so I've gone to great effort to keep this book practical and rooted in reality. I recently read a blog post about succeeding in sales. The author suggested that the best way to sell anything is to position it as the magic bullet—the ultimate answer or method to doing something that we all want to do in life but don't want to work for, like losing weight, getting a fulfilling job, or finding happiness. He offered some supporting information to show that we more often spend money on worthless things that seem like quick fixes than on proven systems that require time and effort. Despite the advice, which I suspect holds some truth, I will tell you this book is not a magic bullet.

Sometimes when we gorge ourselves on meaningful words, we fall into an intention coma—too overwhelmed by other people's thoughts to identify the right choices for ourselves.

This is not a guide of absolute answers. It's crowdsourced wisdom, often supported by scientific, psychological, and sociological research, that may help you experience meaning, happiness, and peace right now, regardless of your circumstances. It's a reflection of and on popular opinion and an examination of the ways we can leverage what we know and what we don't for our individual and collective well-being.

Sharing parts of my personal journey was a lot like doing intermittent cart wheels naked on my front lawn—my stories might be brief, but I certainly put it all out there. In the spirit of that same authenticity, I want to be clear that I am not an expert on living wisely. I suspect that if I presented myself that way, I'd immediately convey my ignorance, because wisdom is a lifelong pursuit. I didn't write this book sitting at a cherrywood desk in my psychiatry office or in between personal development seminars I host around the globe. I wrote this from the shabby couch I bought on Craigslist while running a Twitter account and a website that appear to help a lot of people. I acknowledge my nonexpert status not to undermine my ideas but to remind you up front that we all possess the same capacity to reason, learn, and then act based on what makes sense to us.

You'll notice I didn't ask questions directly relating to religion. I suspected a lot of the questions would inspire spiritual discussions, and decided to broach the subjects that way. You may also notice that none of the tweets have any typical Twitter slang—no abbreviations or emoticons. For the sake of reading ease, I corrected misspellings and omitted excessive punctuation. Lastly, you may wonder why I didn't start each section with a TinyBuddha.com quote, as I do on the site. The simple reason is that I wanted this book to explore our collective understandings, which often parallel many of those same ideas.

I want you to read this knowing that you are not alone. Whatever question you're asking yourself right now, someone else somewhere else—but probably a lot closer than you think—is wondering the very same thing. If you search Twitter for emotional words like happy or frustrated—as I tend to do when coming up with blog topics—you'll find a seemingly infinite number of similar thoughts, feelings, problems, observations, and conclusions.

The questions are what unite us. It's up to me, and it's up to you, to identify and use the answers that empower each of us as individuals.

PAIN

WHY IS THERE SUFFERING IN THE WORLD?

No matter who you are, no matter what you have, no matter what you've achieved, you've hurt at some point in your life. Of the six universal emotions psychologists have identified—happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust, and anger—the majority indicate pain.

Most of us know that what our grandmothers said was true: “This too shall pass.” But it doesn't always seem that way in the moment. When all those pain-induced hormones flood your body, pushing you into survivor mode, it can feel like some catastrophic turn of events has irreparably damaged your life—like your world has permanently fallen apart. If you don't worry hard enough, things might never change. If you don't get angry enough, you'll be accepting that what happened was okay. If you don't get bitter enough, you're opening yourself up to more of that same disastrous hurt.

No. It doesn't work that way. No matter how justified we feel in our emotions, stewing in them is never the answer to making them go away. Stressing by itself can't create a solution—any solution, let alone a rational one. Anger doesn't punish the people or circumstances that hurt us; it punishes us. And bitterness doesn't protect us from pain down the line; if anything, it invites it.

Emotions are not resolutions—and yet we have to let ourselves feel them. Suppressing emotional pain more often than not just creates more of it. This is where it gets confusing: If we're not supposed to resist our feelings, how do we know when to let them go? How can we both allow ourselves to feel what we need to feel and be sure we don't let the present moment pass us by?

In 2003, I sublet a small, unfurnished studio in New York City for a few weeks to figure out how I'd survive if I moved there to pursue my acting dreams. It was in August, and the Times Square area was like a sauna crammed with people sitting arm-to-arm, on laps, and on laps on top of laps, except no one was actually sitting still—we were all trying to get to different places with that New York sense of urgency.

A couple hours after I got the apartment keys, I headed out to hit up the ATM and pick up groceries and other supplies. While I was on my way to the corner store, Manhattan went dark. I didn't know it at the time, but New York was part of multistate power outage. The traffic lights went black, which gave pedestrians the green light to storm the streets, causing massive traffic jams. People began rushing into convenience stores to get provisions for the hours ahead. It was total chaos, and I felt panicked.

I didn't have any cash—or food or candles or a plan of attack. So I sat on a curb, leaned up against a mailbox, and tried to control my breath. Apparently I was more gasping and panting than inhaling and exhaling because a man squatted down, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “Honey, are you okay?” I didn't see that coming—and I also didn't expect he'd listen to me ramble about just arriving, not having any cash, and fearing I might need to sell my body for a sandwich, a flashlight, or both. Without flinching, he gave me $5 and pointed me toward a store. Crammed with panicked, sweating people, the inside reeked, like body odor and cottage cheese after extended time in a beach bag. I was able to grab a bottle of water, but I didn't have enough for food, and the options were getting slim as other people rushed to grab what they could. The woman behind the register gave me a roasted half-duck, and took down my credit card info to charge at a later date. I had food and water; now all I needed was light. Naturally, $5 flashlights were going for over $20 a pop on the street—good old supply and demand. So I ducked into a restaurant, told the bartender my story, and left with seven tea lights.

It was increasingly crowded on the route to my apartment, so I paused in Times Square, which was kind of awesome in its darkness— now that I knew all my basic needs were met. It was like going backstage before a Broadway play, seeing the man-made framework behind the illusion of magic. In fact, it was very similar, since all kinds of people were gathering around musicians putting on impromptu shows. I struck up a conversation with the girl next to me, telling her how surprised I was that New Yorkers were so friendly and willing to lend a hand, even with their own needs to attend to. She said New Yorkers band together during crises, particularly after 9/11. They look out for each other, and they're a lot more compassionate and helpful than the cliché might indicate.

I can't remember her name, but I'll never forget what she told me next: both her father and her boyfriend died in the Twin Towers. In one day, only a couple years before our chance encounter, she lost the two people who mattered most to her in life. They say some deaths are senseless when you imagine they could have been prevented, but death rarely, if ever, makes sense—particularly not when it comes as part of something so deplorably inhumane. I looked at her sitting there, strong, intact, no different looking than I was or anyone else who hasn't known such grief. I wondered how she could go out in the daylight, looking peaceful in the world, knowing firsthand how tragedy can strike so unexpectedly. I looked deeply into her eyes in a potentially invasive way, searching for signs of pervasive inner turmoil. Having endured such a horrific tragedy, she must be a shell of a person, I thought, particularly so soon after her losses.

Then I remembered where I was right before I learned about the 9/11 attacks. I was festering in bed, six prescription bottles on my nightstand, wondering who'd come to my funeral if I died. I'd been in therapy for almost a decade, and yet I still suspected I'd spend the rest of my life feeling alone, miserable, and confined like a prisoner within the deafening cruelty of my mind. I was a chubby, overdeveloped twelve-year-old the first time a boy groped me and called me a whore in the school hallway. After years of hearing “fat slut” from both boys and girls alone and in packs and being grabbed without my consent, I'd begun to believe my consent wasn't necessary. Once, a girl from a neighboring school told me, “I've heard you're thinking of changing schools. Don't bother. Everyone everywhere knows you're a worthless whore.” From that point on, I truly believed this was fact—that everyone I met somehow already knew how pathetic and worthless I was. A decade later, at twenty-two, I still felt trapped under layers of shame and regret, like dozens of lead-filled X-ray aprons piled one on top of the other. I'd tried to starve it away, stuff it away, drink it away, and fight it away, but nothing changed that I felt trapped within my offensive, unlovable skin.

I called my aunt to complain about my misery; I had a roster of regular listeners who indulged my desperation. Not a few seconds into my woe-is-me story, she asked me, “Lori, how can you be thinking about yourself? Don't you know what's happening in the world?” I didn't have any idea. I turned on the television and saw the footage. They kept showing the towers going down, like sand castles slowly crumbling, and a part of me felt like it wasn't real. I knew that people were hurting and that I should be outraged. But I'd numbed my own feelings for so long that it felt nearly impossible to feel for people far removed from me and my debilitating apathy. I'd seen therapist after psychiatrist after pharmacist; I was on anti-depressants, mood stabilizers, and tranquilizers. My whole life was about making sure I didn't have to feel. But how could I see such tragedy and not feel? And even worse, how could I be seeing it and still be so concerned with what I was doing and feeling? What was wrong with me that I was so absorbed in what was wrong with me?

That's the thing about feelings: Sometimes we resist them, and then we sit around feeling more feelings about our feelings, drowning in reactive emotions. We remember what happened and wonder what, if anything, we did to provoke it. We wonder what we could have done to prevent it. We wonder if we deserved it. We think about how unfair things are and how we wish we could go back in time to change them. We think about how we handled things, and if maybe we could have made other choices to change the outcome of what it is. And then after all this resistance, we wonder what's wrong with us for struggling so much in our own self-absorption. After all, there are so many other worse things going on in the world.

The truth, as messy as it sounds, is that the only way out is through. And the only way to let go is to truly believe in the possibility of a different way of being—to know in our head and in our heart that we can live a life that doesn't revolve around having been hurt or fearing future pain. We don't always realize it when we're sitting in our own self-destructed ground zero, but there will be a day when we feel better—if we just let ourselves go through it. Everything gets better with time; how much time is up to us. It's dependent on when we choose to change the stories we tell about our lives; when we decide to spend more time creating the life we want than lamenting the hand we've been dealt; and when we realize that no one's love, forgiveness, or acceptance can be as profoundly healing as our own.

Maybe if I stopped trying to control how I hurt, I'd feel a pain that would teach me what I need to do to love life more and need pain less.

As I looked at my new friend, vulnerable and yet so resilient, I wanted to love and heal her. I couldn't see it, but I knew she must be cracked beneath the surface. I imagined that she cried, screamed, and wailed herself through lonesome, traumatic nights. I visualized her collapsing into the arms of people she loved—other survivors who understood. I wanted to take it all away. I wanted to save her from a suffering that I could only imagine ate away at her soul day and night. I wanted to be her Prozac. I wanted to make her numb to the reality of her losses.

Then I realized that in that moment, she didn't need a hero. In that moment, she was existing independent of her tragic past. She wasn't heaving, having flashbacks, or fighting with the injustices of the world. She was responding to what was in front of her. She was eating a salad, albeit a wilting one; listening to music she seemed to enjoy; and acknowledging me, an absolute stranger sharing a once-in-a-lifetime experience within an eerily tame Times Square. She didn't need someone to take the pain away forever, because she was taking forever one minute at a time.

We all choose from moment to moment where we focus our attention and what we tell ourselves. We're always going to want to have more of the good things, less of the bad things, and a greater sense of control over the distribution. While we can't control that life involves hurting, we can control how long we endure it and what we do with it.

To a large degree, it's irrelevant to question why we have to suffer, since that just prolongs acceptance of what is. But it's human nature to want to understand. If we're going to form conclusions, they might as well be empowering ones that help us work through pain and let go. With that in mind, I asked on Twitter, “Why is there suffering in the world?”

PAIN IS A TEACHER

Suffering should be used as a teacher. This teacher will teach you about yourself and the world around you. ∼@d1sco_very

There is suffering in the world to make people wiser and stronger. ∼@ittybittyfaerie

Without suffering no lessons will be learned; without suffering none will be necessary. ∼@andrew2pack

We experience suffering to understand and realize our true strength. Pain leads us to improve our quality of life and open to love. ∼@ditzl

Do not seek justification for suffering. There is none. Accept its existence and learn from it. ∼@Mark10023

It's a natural human instinct to resist pain and to avoid its causes at all costs. In fact, we experience a biological response to perceived danger that tells us when to run for our lives—or in some cases, when to sit around stressing about our inability to run as quickly as we'd like. Just like an animal senses it might be eaten and receives an increase in adrenaline, enabling escape, early humans also developed a fine-tuned fight-or-flight response to survive in a dangerous world. It originates in the amygdala—the part of the brain that creates fear conditioning.

The only difference between us now and us then is that instead of being attacked by lions, as we may have been centuries ago, we're more likely to get in romantic squabbles or professional confrontations. More often than not, when we start kicking and screaming, there's little if any real threat; there's the just the fear of something potentially uncomfortable. We know intellectually that a disagreement or challenge at work won't kill us—and that stressing won't do anything to change what was or what will be. But we've conditioned ourselves to fight for control over our circumstances; and when that control seems to slip away, we panic. It's an ironic way of avoiding discomfort, but sometimes we make ourselves miserable to be sure that nothing or no one else can. We choose to hurt ourselves through stress and dread just to be sure we're prepared when something else could potentially hurt us.

We can take almost anything that hurts and recycle it into something good once we're ready to learn from it.

On the other end of the spectrum, we've historically romanticized pain. We're always consuming survivor stories, watching movies and online videos about success after extreme adversity, and channeling our inner Nietzsche—telling ourselves that what doesn't kill us only makes us stronger. To some degree, this is good, because we're reminding ourselves that it is possible to bounce back after a difficult time. But it's almost as if we imagine the greater the pain, the greater the spirit; or the harder the journey, the more rewarding the destination. It's as if we believe the one who hurts the most learns the most and has the most to give the world. Or perhaps we linger in the exhausting act of trying to control the chaos because that allows us to avoid acknowledging the gap between who we are and who we want to be.

In The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle explains that we hold on to problems because they give us a sense of identity. This has been true for me. For years, I focused all my pain into the will to wither away. After weeks of surviving on a small selection of Sweet'N Low—flavored, low-calorie blandness, I'd feel shooting pains in my chest, like my heart was trying to escape its prison. My abdominal muscles would contract and spasm inside the cavern that was my stomach, while my mind spun in a psychedelic hypnotizing swirl. I'd collapse, clammy and wobbly, to the floor just outside the bathtub and pray that my brother or sister would walk by the door and hear me panting shallow requests for help to my bed. I was always waiting for someone to rescue me, while secretly hoping they wouldn't jeopardize my status as someone who always needed to be saved.

Eventually I'd crawl my way to the kitchen where I'd lay with my cheek against the cool tile, nibbling on a saltine, secure in the knowledge I had to feel only one knowable bodily pain. With such extreme physical weakness and the possibility of severe malnourishment, there was just no need to think about anything else that hurt in my life. Nothing else was as dangerous and life-threatening. The weightiness of this problem, juxt aposed against my own spectacular physical lightness, obscured the reality of my deep emotional hurt. Within this persistent suffering, I felt good at avoiding pain. It took years for me to consider that maybe if I stopped trying to control how I hurt, I'd feel a pain that would teach me what I need to do to love life more and need pain less. That maybe if I released the torture that made me feel safe, I'd wade through the discomfort of what was really bothering me so that I could live a life less defined by pain.

When we identify where we're hurting and why, whether it's something physical or emotional, we have the power to understand its cause and do something about it. But that means we have to be willing to let go of all the drama, comfort, and maybe even pride that accompany a sad story to make way for a better one. Before we can learn from our pain to make positive change in our lives, we have to learn how to want pain less. Once we decide to stop clinging, chasing, and controlling pain, then we have immense power to shape our worlds.

We can take almost anything that hurts and recycle it into something good once we're ready to learn from it. If you're hurting over trouble in your relationship, your pain may be teaching you that you need to find the strength to walk away. If you're hurting because people don't seem to like you, your pain may be teaching you that you need to stop depending on approval for your overall well-being. If you're hurting because your thoughts are tormenting you, your pain may be teaching you that you alone are the cause of your deepest suffering, and that in accepting that, you have the power to set yourself free. Of course this all depends on the most important question: are you ready to be free?

LEARN FROM PAIN TO MAKE POSITIVE CHANGES.

If you're hurting and feeling angry, resentful, or resistant:

Identify the cause of your pain. Are you reliving something that happened long ago? Are you hurting because of a current situation that isn't working for you? It's easier to stuff pain down than to address it, but you can only learn about what you need if you're willing to acknowledge that you haven't gotten it and how that makes you feel. The next step is to ask yourself if you have some investment in hurting. Is there a part of you that wants to stay in a situation that you know is bad? You can only let go of pain if you understand why you're holding on to it.

Feel the pain. Don't try to hide it, avoid it, fight it, or run from it—sit with it instead. It may feel overwhelming, but know that every feeling eventually transforms, and it will happen faster if you stop resisting. Sink deep into it and get clear about exactly why it hurts. What is it that you want to change?

Establish what this pain teaches you to change. If you're hurting over an event from the past or something that's completely out of your hands, the only thing you have the power to change is how and when you think about that issue. That means accepting that there are some things you cannot control and deciding not to waste this moment fighting that, because this moment—right now—is all there is. If you're hurting over something in the present—like a relationship that doesn't serve you or a sense of loneliness—the pain is teaching you that you need to move on or meet new people. Once you establish the lesson, you have the power to use it. The only thing standing between you and freedom is your story about why you can't have it.

PAIN HELPS US APPRECIATE PLEASURE

There is suffering for us to recognize the meaning of happiness. There can't be one without the other. ∼@Laurie_AMU

Others’ suffering lets me give hope, charity, and love. My suffering gives these opportunities to others. No humanity without it. ∼@dgalvin22

There's suffering in the world in order to show us how much beauty there is, too. You could not have one without the other. ∼@cphilli3

Suffering brings joy, happiness, love, generosity, and all good things into relief so that we may recognize them. ∼@LittleWordGods

On the other side of our instinct to avoid pain, there's the persistent longing for things that feel good—what Sigmund Freud referred to as the pleasure principle. What's interesting to note, though, is that pain and pleasure really are intricately connected—not just because they are two sides of the same coin but also because one often creates the other. When we experience stress or pain, our bodies create endorphins that intercept the messages that would tell the brain the body should hurt. It's why a lot of people engage in thrill-seeking activities that may cause them physical discomfort, and also why athletes push through—the euphoric high that accompanies immense pain.

It's also why people eat chili peppers, which contain a high amount of capsaicin, a compound that triggers pain receptors through a burning sensation. In his 2008 Washington Post article “The Pleasure Is in the Pain,” Andreas Viestad discusses his trip to the world's “Chili Belt,” where he conducted research for a book on spices. In Mozambique, Thailand, and India, he observed a dramatic shift in energy and enthusiasm after people consumed a chili-pepper-infused meal. One of the men in Maputo explained they cry so hard while eating the spicy foods so that they can laugh after the meal.

This same idea applies in many areas of our lives. We watch tragic films to experience the cathartic release of engaging in emotional stories. We choose to watch violent murders in horror movies, even though we'd never want to see or be someone actually being maimed or tortured, because we want to feel those primal sensations of fear while knowing we're safely removed from any actual danger. We alternate dives in the icy pool with quick dips in the hot tub, enjoying dramatically shifting our body temperatures in a short amount of time. And then there's the way we take on professional and personal challenges knowing there are difficulty and risk involved. Pain paves the path for pleasure—and sometimes, as I mentioned before, we feel the greater the hurt, the sweeter the reward.

In addition to creating conditions for pleasure, pain helps us survive—which is, in fact, a prerequisite for feeling good. In his book The Gift of Pain

PRAISE FOR TINY BUDDHA