Hello and welcome to the secular Buddhism podcast, a podcast that presents Buddhist

teachings, concepts, and ideas from a secular perspective. You don't need to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist,

you can use what you learn to simply be a better whatever you already are. I am your host

Noah Rocheta and let's jump in to today's topic.

Welcome back to another episode of the secular Buddhism podcast.

For today's episode I want to share some thoughts around a topic or a subject that we're all quite familiar with,

and this is the notion of suffering. But don't worry, this isn't going to be a doom and gloom

episode. Instead, I want to explore how we can

transform our relationship with suffering and maybe even find some unexpected joy along the way.

Now the topic of Buddhism, sorry the topic of suffering is the very first topic you encounter when you start learning about

Buddhism. In fact I would say that all Buddhist teachings are centered around this central notion that life is difficult and life entails experiencing suffering.

And when we talk about suffering from the Buddhist perspective we're talking

about not just major tragedies but every form of discomfort or anguish or unsatisfactoryness, whether that be stubbing your toe in the morning, feeling stressed about work,

arguing with a loved one, the Buddha taught the suffering or dukah is a universal part of the human experience.

It's something that we all deal with

regardless of who we are or where we come from or what we do or don't do to try to avoid it.

It's inescapable.

And here's the interesting part.

Buddhism doesn't just say,

yep, life is tough, you should just deal with it.

Instead, it goes on to offer us tools

to work with our suffering and to transform the relationship we have with it.

...