Illuminating Joy and Banishing Suffering

 Today, let's dive into the intricate dance of suffering, peace, and happiness. Picture suffering as the absence of peace, much like darkness is the absence of light. This theme aligns with our upcoming group coaching session on presence and power, where we'll explore these concepts further.

Happiness, often mistaken for fleeting satisfaction, finds its roots in what I term as peace – a state of calmness and security. I want to share a recent personal experience that illustrates the difference between pain and suffering. Despite a severe toothache requiring urgent attention, I wasn't unhappy; I was just in pain.

 The crucial point here is distinguishing between pain and suffering. Pain, whether physical or emotional, is a signal that demands acknowledgment. Yet, we often distract ourselves from this discomfort, inadvertently allowing the wounds to persist.

My journey reveals that suffering emerges in the absence of peace, primarily when we confuse pain with suffering. It's essential to develop the tools to navigate emotional and spiritual pain, which often leads us down paths of distraction and addiction.

As we navigate day-to-day life, the pursuit of peace is tied to our engagement with the world. Are we making decisions aligned with our values? Peace, fundamentally, is the ability to fully inhabit the present moment, unencumbered by unresolved pain.

Here's a challenge for you: Have you processed your past? Do your decisions align with your values? As we prepare for our upcoming session on presence and power, let's embark on this journey toward a more profound understanding of ourselves and the peace within.

So our topic today is and, I carefully chose this. Hopefully it lands well. And, and the way I put it is that suffering is the absence of peace, just like.

[00:00:15] Darkness is the absence of light. And this is a good theme for, for our topic this week as well, because we're talking about presence and power and our group coaching session this week, we're going to go deeper into it. So I thought I'll talk a little bit about a lot of people. I mean, happiness is something that people have thought about for a long time, but happiness can be fleeting.

[00:00:36] And sometimes people confuse happiness with momentary satisfaction. So we'll, we'll, Figure out those distinctions, but the deeper form of happiness is what I call and , what I like calling is peace. And peace is a feeling that we feel at least psychologically and maybe even spiritually is a state of calmness that you can have.

[00:00:58] It's a state of being okay. It's a state of feeling secure. There are many names that you can give it. And another way to put it is happiness is peace in motion. So when you're at peace, when you do things, you do it in a happy way and a peaceful way.

[00:01:17] But happiness is usually, when you're at peace, whatever you do, you're happy in it. Whether it's work, you're with your family, whether you're with yourself, whatever it is. You're doing it because it comes from a better place. And so, why did I put it the reason why I put it is that suffering is the absence of peace.

[00:01:37] And I'll talk about where that comes from in my experience and what I've seen with people. But a lot of times people confuse suffering with pain. Those are two different things. And I want to talk about pain a little bit. So this past weekend, I actually had to experience a lot of pain and that pain came in the form of physical pain.

[00:01:56] So I actually got while we were traveling as like [00:02:00] two days before, we're supposed to go to Disney with kids for like the first time for three days, I get this or toothpick and it's not going away. This horrible toothache is not going away, and I see that it's affecting my gum too, and I feel the pain is getting worse and worse.

[00:02:16] I thought it was like, okay, it's gonna go away on its own. I cleaned my teeth, did a bunch of stuff. Nothing worked. In fact, it was getting worse and worse. And by the second day, I'm like this feels like an infection. It's so I Call a bunch of, we were in the middle of kind of nowhere too, so we're away from cities.

[00:02:33] So I call like 10 different dentists in the area. So finally I got a hold of somebody who's like, was able to see me. And they were about an hour and a half away. I go there, they take an x ray. They take a look at everything. They put the thing. The doctor was a little bit too jolly about this. He was a little bit too jolly about this, but he's like, we're going to have to take up two of your teeth.

[00:02:55] I'm like, what? Not even one. So the infection somehow, I still have my two of my wisdom teeth. So the infection started in the wisdom teeth and, and it went towards there. And then the infection can get dangerous when in your body can't fight it off. So anyway It was pretty bad. Just let's put it this way.

[00:03:12] I got five injections and it was, I could still feel it because the infection and the next day or two, I could still feel it while I was with my family. We were going around. So it was tough to be in that state. But here's the distinction. I was not unhappy. I was just in pain. I just had pain and pain to me is that your body is sending a signal to pay attention to something.

[00:03:38] It's just a signal. Now, it does. It feels uncomfortable. It feels like you, you cannot focus on things at times. So, of course, I took pain medication and other things. If you've ever had any kind of toothache or really severe pain, you know, that it's hard to focus on things. It's hard to keep him. And part of your attention goes on holding that up.

[00:03:59] Now, [00:04:00] we also have emotional pain. So people sometimes confuse pain with suffering. It is not so. Pain is the signal from your body. telling you that something you need to, it's something you need to deal with. If you cut yourself, your body's going to send you a signal so you can deal with it. Otherwise, you're going to bleed to death.

[00:04:20] Same thing with emotional pain. When you have emotional pain, it's telling you something to pay attention to. Now, the problem is that If we cut ourselves, we usually know what to do with that because most people understand what physical pain is or we hit or break a bone or something like something is off.

[00:04:36] I need to deal with this. I need to go to the doctor. I put a bandaid on and whatever it might be. Now the problem is that We have no idea what to do with emotional pain. So when we have it, you literally can feel it in different parts of your body. When we have it, this is what we do. We change our focus.

[00:04:53] And we have the ability to do that. We distract ourselves with something else. And it's a really cool adaptation that human beings have. We can distract ourselves to work. We can distract ourselves to do something else. We can be busy. We can be on TikTok. Other things. Now, the problem happens when you distract yourself enough from any kind of pain.

[00:05:14] It's a lot like a physical wound that where blood is coming out, there's emotional wounds, energetic equivalent of that is that you're gushing something. There's blood, there's something leaking that you don't know what to do with and your body's hurting. It doesn't know what else to tell you other than to give you that signal.

[00:05:35] Now, because we don't have the right tools for it, we ignore it. Now I did that for, I know exactly what that feels like. I did that for 30 years of my life. 30 years of my life. I didn't know how to deal with that. So what I did was I found different ways of distracting myself. Eventually I couldn't distract myself the normal ways.

[00:05:56] Then I went towards addictive things. So a lot of people think that [00:06:00] addiction is because of a substance. Actually it's a combination of a substance being addictive and the addictive personality. Why are people addicted to things? Why do people have propensity to get addicted? they, they need to get away from something else that they need to deal with.

[00:06:16] It's easier to get addicted to something. For example, whether it's heroin, whether it's alcohol, whether it's drugs, whether it's power, whether it's, whether it's entertainment, whether it's shopping, whatever it might be, it distracts you from the actual pain that you're dealing with. Now I want to circle back to our topic.

[00:06:36] The topic that I said is that, that suffering is the absence of peace. Okay. Just like dark darkness is the absence of light. So then what brings you peace? Well, part of it is clear based on what I'm saying is that you need to deal with your pain. It's just sending you a signal to deal with it. That's it.

[00:06:55] But before that so why? And I also give you an example that when I had a toothache, I wasn't, I wasn't suffering. I was just in pain. I was still happy. I was still connected with my family. I was still connected with my life. There was nothing. I didn't think my life was falling apart. Part. I accepted the pain as it was and I actually did a lot of things.

[00:07:15] I jumped around, danced around, played with my kids, did everything that I would normally do. I just had pain internally. That's it. So, where does, then why was I at peace? And this is, this has been my journey and I want, the reason why I'm sharing this is because I want you to approach, think about your own journey in life because yours will be a little bit different than mine but there are unique, there are similarities to our experiences because we're all humans.

[00:07:42] The reason why I have peace. And there are times when I don't, and I know why I don't, at least. There are times when I don't have peace, I know that there's something I'm not, I'm running away from. I'm not dealing with internally. It's usually emotional or spiritual in nature. So [00:08:00] how did I get to a point where I've I have peace in my life?

[00:08:03] I have peace within myself. Which is, like I said, happiness is peace in motion. So, when you're at peace, you can do things that are happy. And so how did I find that? The way I found what that was the way was towards understanding myself, understanding my mind better, understanding my body better, understanding my place around me and experiencing around everything around me.

[00:08:31] And that's the complete opposite of running away. And this is where, this is, this is why it's so different. So when you run away from your pain, you're actually running away from everything that's around you. You're trying to get focused on one thing, on something, whether it's games, alcohol, addiction, addictions of all sorts, TikTok, whatever it might be.

[00:08:52] When you get focused on that, it gets you to forget about the pain, whether it's physical or emotional in nature. Now when I went back towards my pain, guess what, it was actually very painful to deal with the emotional things with the spiritual pain that I had, the emotional pain that I had. But the, the beginning was really hard, but as soon as I went deeper into it, I realized that, shoot, it's not as bad.

[00:09:19] I just need to deal with it. And as soon as I went to the other side of the pain, I felt that, oh, that was just my system sending me signals. That I needed to deal with something and on the other side was who I was beyond the pain who I was beyond the pain was much bigger than the pain that I was experiencing.

[00:09:42] It was much bigger than all the things that were coming towards me and I want to make this a little bit more tangible. I'll give you a couple of examples. So for example, 1 of 1 of the ways that I experienced a lot of pain was my lack of ability to express who I was and what [00:10:00] mattered to me. I didn't have a voice and there's a part of me that wanted to express that voice and when I didn't know how to do that, it created pain when I didn't know how to deal with the pain I created suffering in my life and the way I created suffering is by running away from that pain, not not going towards it.

[00:10:24] And the reason why I'm explaining this is that a lot of suffering can be dealt with is to self explore, to understand what you're about, what is it that you need internally. What is it that matters to you deep down? This is why we do a lot of work around vision. This is why we do a lot of work around.

[00:10:40] What are you feeling on a consistent basis? What's happening on a day to day basis? What, what are you feeling in your body? What are you feeling? What are you seeing around you? Are you actually engaged in your life? Are you distracting yourself from your life? Do you have challenges when it comes to your relationships?

[00:10:57] What is it? Are you seeing the person to be a challenge or something underneath that? That's creating a challenge for you. And that's the other piece of it. Whenever we have pain, we think that the solutions are on the outside. It's not. Most solutions are actually internal in nature. So, for example let's take away baseline.

[00:11:16] So once you solve the baseline survivability, and I'm pretty much going to assume everybody here is not trying to survive in their life. If you're in survival financially, relationship wise your health and well being or somebody close to you, then outside of that, a lot of your problems are actually internal.

[00:11:36] It's not external in nature. So what does that mean? That means that when you've solved for your survival needs for finances, which gives you the food, water, shelter and all that stuff, and you've solved your problems around, you have a companionship in your life, you have community, you have family and other things.

[00:11:53] And third, you've solved for your health and well being and those around you. If those three things are there, [00:12:00] then whatever we're solving for has nothing to do with our pain. We're trying to get something in the future that we think will solve what you were feeling right now, whether that's restlessness, anxiety, disconnection lack of happiness, depression, whatever it might be.

[00:12:19] We think that, for example, if we get a different go to a different place, if we live in a bigger house. Will feel better if we live in a different partner will feel better if we have a billion dollars will feel better. Or if we go to these places will feel better. Maybe, maybe not. The question that I would ask is, how much do you know yourself?

[00:12:43] And how much do you understand your own patterns? Why, why are you trying to go solve it externally? Is it, does it really need to be solved externally? Or is there an internal pain that you need to deal with? And usually internal pain is either spiritual in nature or emotional in nature. So emotional is that you haven't processed something from your past.

[00:13:06] You haven't processed something and made sense of it in your past. That's usually connected to our psychological state that comes from our family structure. So if you have never gotten any kind of therapy, you haven't, or you haven't explored it on your own, you wouldn't even know what that is. But I have a feeling that everybody on the call has to some degree, which means that there are things you need to explore from your past, process it and deal with it to move, to be here in the present moment.

[00:13:32] And second, The spiritual side of it is that you need to make sense of the things around you. So spiritual doesn't just mean you I have a broader definition around. It doesn't just mean belief in God. It just means that how do you see yourself existentially human beings? We have the biggest problem we have is that we're aware that we're aware that we're aware.

[00:13:52] We, so for example, we know that we're going to die. At least physically, we know that we're gonna die and we're [00:14:00] acutely aware of that. We're also acutely, acutely aware of other people around us are gonna die. We're also gonna, we also know that other people around us are gonna get sick. At some point or die, we also know that there are a lot of unpredictabilities in our environment.

[00:14:15] These actually create internal stressors in our system. So how do you deal with that? What are the tools that you have around that? So there are a few factors that are coming in. If you haven't processed your past, you will not be a piece. It doesn't mean that you need to heal from everything. It just means that you need to make sense of your past and the story in your head.

[00:14:38] That's one. Two, you need to figure out your existential challenge. This is why religion is such a big thing. Religion solves for one problem. And the problem was that what is, how do we make sense of our place in this vast universe? How do we make sense of it? Religion tackled that problem for a lot of people for a long time.

[00:14:58] Now, science is trying to do that. It's, it's not as successful as we think. It's successful in the realm of giving us better technology, but it's not successful in the realm of trying to help us to help us be at peace because the more answers we come up with, the more questions come up and we're like, okay, we're, we're a tiny little blue dot hurtling through space.

[00:15:16] Any moment it's going to poof, disappear. That does not bring you peace. It's like, holy shit, then what is going to happen? So, we don't, it, that model doesn't actually work very well. So, figure out a way to create a model, whether that comes from your faith in God, or whatever it might be, a model that brings you peace.

[00:15:36] Whatever that is. Now, you might say, well, am I making up something? Maybe, I don't know. We, we don't know. We don't know enough about the universe that we're in to know whether or not we're making up something or not. Science is making up crap every day. It creates a hypothesis, and we go towards it, and we experiment with it, and maybe or maybe not it will be true.

[00:15:56] Religion kind of served a similar purpose, except religion, [00:16:00] religion tries to help you understand your internal state, your subjective state. So that part, you can decide what is, how are you going to look at the world around you? Are you going to believe in God? Are you going to have a better perspective?

[00:16:16] Are you going to be at peace with, with, with the universe? Are you going to think that this is a violent place we live in? What is your model for how you view the universe? That makes a big difference in your internal state. And then finally, in the day to day life, what are you doing to, to be engaged in your life?

[00:16:38] What are the things that you're engaged? Are you picking the things around you that matter to you? Like the life partner that you have, the business partners that you have, the job that you have, the less, control you have over those things, the less you're going to feel at peace. There's only one exception.

[00:16:56] The exception is that if you have less control, you need to just accept that you want that level of control. But you, if you want more control over those things, then you, that's where courage comes in is, can I make different decisions here? Do I have the right life partner? Or is, can I improve my relationship with my life partner in my life?

[00:17:16] Do I have the right business, the work that I do, the time that I spend, 8 to 10 hours a day, or 12 hours a day, or 16 hours a day, do I enjoy it? Am I engaged with it? I'm not talking about just personal, just satisfaction. I mean, like, do I care about it? Does it matter to me? The life that I'm building, future facing, does that matter to me?

[00:17:41] All these things can create peace, but ultimately, if you want to look at it in a basic form as peace, is that you're fully here in the moment, connected to everything around you and within you. You're not trying to run away from anything. And that is a hard state to be in for anybody. I can tell you in [00:18:00] a given day, I kind of fluctuate between those.

[00:18:02] So there are times where I'm completely at peace. There are times where there's restlessness there. There are times I have a lot of emotional pain and I'm trying to deal with it. At the least I have the tools to move through it. There are times where I can't make sense of certain things and I try to look for answers.

[00:18:18] There are times where I feel disconnected from my family. Then I'm like, what's happening? What is the solution for that? And usually the, the, some of the first thoughts that come in as well, you need to solve for this thing externally. I'm like, is that, is that really the problem? Is it as money, the problem, or is it the way I'm looking at it is is our life circumstances are the problem, or is it the way we're feeling about each other?

[00:18:44] What is it? And, and the reason why I'm sharing this is it's, it's complex, but it's very simple. It comes down to your, Inner experience of what is it that you're feeling consistently. Are you aware of it? Where does that come from? Does that come from your past or is it connected to the present moment? Are you aligned and aligned with the future that you're creating?

[00:19:04] Are the elements in your life the things that matter to you? If they don't, are you making decisions to create the things that matter to you and get rid of the things that don't matter to you? And those are hard questions to ask. And the more you ask those questions, actually, the more pain you create internally.

[00:19:23] And this is why a lot of people don't ask those questions. Why? Because it creates discomfort. And we don't like discomfort, but actually a lot of growth and awareness and presence and peace comes from going towards that discomfort. So my question to you is what is happening? Have you processed your past?

[00:19:47] Have you surrounded yourself with the things that you value and matter to you? Are you building towards a future that matters to you? How are you looking at the bigger existential part of your life? What, [00:20:00] what do you believe in? What matters to you? How do you look at that life? And I'll leave this with one last quote.

[00:20:06] I think it was Einstein who said this. It's like, the most important question to ask is, Is this universe Hold on, I might butcher this, , but is this universe basically is this universe net positive or net negative?

[00:20:20] Which means that the world that you're showing up in, is your reaction to it, is to, you need to constantly protect yourself from, from it, or do you need to be open to it? And that determines how you actually show up in the world. That determines how you talk to other people, how you connect, are people harmful in general or not?

[00:20:38] Is the world that you're living in evil or not? Those are questions to answer internally for yourself, especially when you get to a certain age and you're creating a life. Are the day to day things happening in your life? Do you know how to process them? How to deal with them? And do you have tools? Are you developing tools to deal with them?

[00:20:57] If you're not asking these questions, usually here's what business owners resort to. They have one solution to everything. I need more money. And I need more cashflow. There's a solution to everything is cashflow money. That, that solution is actually good for one thing, creating more options, resources, and I like that too.

[00:21:14] That's why I'm able to travel because I've created resources. So I have the time and options to be able to do this stuff. But trust me, when you're with your family or with your, on your, on your own and you're traveling, you're doing stuff and in that moment, you don't know how to deal with that and you feel disconnected with those around you or with yourself.

[00:21:35] It doesn't matter where you're on, whether you're on top of the world or in the entertainment district or in nature, you will be suffering. You will not be at peace. So the initial point might be is get enough resources to get out of, get yourself out of survival. After that, the, the challenge is to figure out how can you improve the quality of your experience?

[00:21:57] How can you bring more peace? And the more peace you [00:22:00] bring, the better. The lower the suffering becomes, the easier it becomes for us to deal with pain, whether it's physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, any kind. So I'll leave it at that. I know I kind of took it in different places, but I want you to think about this and we're going to go much deeper into this.

[00:22:16] And our group call on presence and power, where how can we bring more presence and the only way you're going to be present. Is if you know how to create peace, otherwise you're going to have way too much discomfort and pain to even be want to be here in your life.