A Heartstream Reflection
Dukkha
Dear Friends,
Reminding you of Heartstream Sangha this Sunday:
Sunday, May 3 - First Sundays online, every month, 5:00–6:15 pm ET/ 2:00-3:15 PT.
A sit. A short reflection. A question or two. Sometimes both of us, sometimes one of us, sometimes a guest teacher or a student voice we’re grateful to make room for. Humble beginnings, not a disclaimer. The whole idea.
We’d love to have you there. Full details and registration at heartstreamsangha.com.
A Heartstream Reflection on Dukkha and Freedom from Clinging
4:52 a.m. Eight minutes before the alarm.
A bird outside the window, oddly cheerful, considering. The kind of cheerful that, with eight hours of sleep behind you, you might call beautiful. With five, you call it something else.
The body had already made its first request. Not gently.
The phone was on the nightstand. Again.
It was supposed to be in the hallway. That had been the intention. But here it was. Face down in the dark, eight minutes ahead of schedule, the screen already beginning its slow bright insistence.
The body doesn’t wait for permission.
It wanted water. It wanted to empty itself. It wanted, in that particular wordless way it has, to return to the sleep that was just beginning to go somewhere. In three hours there would be a morning sit. Cushion, bell, the slow work of paying attention. But that was three hours away. Right now it was 4:52 a.m., a body in the dark, and Tuesday building itself whether anyone had agreed to it or not.
Of course there is a Pali word for the pressure of all these relentlessly changing conditions. The word is dukkha, which most often gets translated accurately, but not completely, as “suffering.” The reason it doesn’t quite translate is that “suffering” implies something has gone wrong. Dukkha means something closer to this: the inherent unsatisfactoriness of a life made entirely of a flow of conditions. The low-grade, sometimes high-grade, friction of being a creature that requires constant maintenance just to keep going.
Hunger is the worst disease, the Dhammapada says. Conditioned things the worst suffering.
War. Grief. Diagnosis. The phone call that changes everything. Nope.
Hunger. Because all is hunger.
The hunger never stops. You eat breakfast and the body files the same request by noon. You sleep eight hours and exhaustion comes back around by evening. You get the headache to leave and three days later it returns, slightly rearranged. The body is a fire that requires constant feeding. And the fire does not negotiate.
This same fire exists outwardly, in the world. Societal conflict and cruelty diminish only to rear their all-too-familiar heads again. A war ends here, but breaks out there. We care for each other, yet still we see that some will not get enough. It is imperative, and the only way to truly live, to try to ease suffering and bring joy. Yet we see that – beyond our control – time marches on, burning away the edges of the ease and joy. Relief will rise again, but we are in a cycle called samsara.
This is what the tradition means when it speaks of the dukkha of conditioned existence, more specifically saṃkhāra-dukkha in Pali, the suffering underneath the suffering. It lives closer to the surface than we think. Closer to the ordinary hum of a Wednesday. The unease that sits beneath contentment like a refrigerator you stopped hearing years ago but that has been running the entire time.
Some of us wake up into a world that has been practicing dukkha on our bodies long before we learned the Pali word for it. In this household, that sentence lands differently depending on which body is reading it.
The phone drops into the toilet. The screen cracks before 8 a.m. You get hangry, genuinely, unreasonably, low-blood-sugar angry at someone who doesn’t deserve it, and somewhere underneath the apology you already know you owe them, there is just this: I needed lunch. That’s it. That’s all this was.
The Buddha noticed this with the precision of a physician. His first noble truth was a diagnosis. He looked at the full scope of human experience: birth, aging, illness, death, the ache of a life that keeps not quite cooperating, and he named it. All of it. Without ever looking away.
And then he said something that tends to get lost in translation: not getting what is wanted is also dukkha. The ordinary kind. The wish that the body would cooperate. The wish that the mood would lift. The wish that the pleasant morning would stay pleasant instead of sliding, the way all mornings do, toward noon and its own demands.
In the Saṃyutta Nikāya the Buddha said something that stops most people cold the first time they hear it: whatever is felt is included in suffering. The hard things, yes. And the pleasant morning too. The good year. Even love.
Even love, from its very first moment, carries somewhere inside it the knowledge that this too will change. That is not a flaw in love. It is just what love is made of, the same conditions as everything else, moving the same direction.
The pleasant things don’t hold either. The good coffee goes cold. The satisfying conversation ends. Good news breaks through the noise, for a while. The body that felt rested at 7 a.m. is asking for something else by noon. We spend our lives finding new ones, new pleasures, new comforts, new arrangements, because the nature of pleasant things is to dissolve. We reach because reaching is what a conditioned mind does in a conditioned world.
In beings subject to aging, illness, death, the wish arises: may we not be subject to these things. But this is not to be achieved by wanting. This is the stress of not getting what is wanted.
— MN 141, Sāriputta
For some of us, that wish has been answered with silence. The dukkha of not getting what is wanted includes the dukkha of being told the wanting itself is illegitimate.
Sit with that for a moment.
The teaching holds all of it. It’s that life is conditioned. Every arrangement we make, every good habit, every loving relationship, every hard-won peace, is made of conditions. And conditions shift.
What the tradition offers is not escape from this. It is a different way of meeting it, closer in, less defended, without the ongoing argument about whether it should be happening at all.
The Buddha’s instructions for mindfulness in the Satipaṭthāna Sutta include eating, drinking, urinating, defecating, walking, standing, falling asleep, waking up, speaking, and remaining silent. The sacred field of awareness is embarrassingly ordinary. The path does not begin when we finally get our act together. It begins in the bathroom. At the kitchen counter. In the body making its demands at 4:52 a.m., eight minutes before anyone agreed to be awake.
Dukkha is the very ground of practice. The place where the teaching stops being information and becomes experience. Something we meet, again and again, in the body we didn’t choose, on the Tuesday that asked nothing of us except that we keep showing up inside it.
The moment we recognize this as dukkha rather than as some moral or personal failure, something shifts. The suffering doesn’t stop. But our relationship to it does.
We don’t practice to escape this life. We practice to stop arguing with it.
Stop fighting the fire. Feed it with awareness and love. Watch what happens when you meet the body’s demands, the hunger, the exhaustion, the stiffness, the phone on the nightstand… with the opposite of resistance. Intimacy, openness, awareness.
What you find there has a name. The teachings have been pointing at it for twenty-five centuries. Non-clinging. Freedom. Pure love.
When we connect with the heartstream, we can fall into the heartstream. And then we can fall away from the grip of resistance that holds us apart and down. Connection with unsatisfactoriness and suffering becomes the vehicle out and through to unshakeable happiness.
“The essence of the spiritual path lies only in the beauty of the ordinariness, in the mundane, and in the freedom from separation of the spiritual and the ordinary.”
— Dr. Thynn Thynn
With love,
Tara and Devin The Heartstream Sangha
taramulay.com | devinberry.org
Tara Mulay and Devin Berry are the co-founders of Heartstream Sangha. Monthly online gatherings — First Sundays, 5–6:15 pm ET — at heartstreamsangha.com.
Inclining the Mind Towards the Beautiful Factors, Devin Berry, Tara Mulay, Victoria Cary, Monica Magtoto (Movement). Sept. 14-19. Details and Registration.
Insight & Metta retreat with Tara Mulay, Devin Berry & Hakim Tafari (Qi Gong) Big Bear Retreat Center, CA. Sept 27th - Oct 1st. Details and Registration
Heartstream month residency: The Forest Refuge, July 2027 details in September
Other upcoming offerings from each of us: taramulay.com | devinberry.org