It's Not About Making Us Feel "Better"

[This is a transcript from the sangha teaching on January 8, 2026.]

So what happens is that I get an idea, and then I develop it through journaling so that it can be transmitted as a teaching. And my idea was “why would we engage with a process that is not meant to make us feel better?” And so that's really a key element here – that we are not engaging in this work in order to get some particular result. We may want a lot of particular results, however, what we get is what we get.

 Alright, so the question on the table is… “Why would we engage with a process that is not meant to make us feel better?” Let's imagine that vipassana, which is the work that we do here, “seeing things clearly as they are,” can stop our anxiousness or discomfort and make us calm and at ease. What we are imagining is the hype that sells commercial introspection. 

 Okay, so that happens. Then what? In other words, your anxiousness, your discomfort, goes away. Then what? Then the practice becomes “getting away” from something, and if it goes awry, and we don't get the result, we've gotten before, then the process didn't “work.” We suffer because our cessation – in other words, our cessation of that experience that we want to stop – is based on the presence of certain external conditions. Our happiness, our ease, whatever it might be is based on external conditions over which we have, perhaps, (and often) no control. 

External conditions are huge causes of suffering. Wanting the conditions to be the way we want them to be is a cause of dukkha [suffering]. Allowing things to be known as they are (vipassana) and letting them be as they are abandons the origin of the dukkha rather than creating more dukkha. 

I'll repeat that... Allowing things to be known as they are, and letting them be as they are abandons the origin of the dukkha rather than creating more dukkha. 

If I allow it to be then I am not wanting it to be different (which is creating the dukkha) If I am allowing it to be – if I'm opening the hand and letting it flow through – that is where the cessation arises, not in the result of an external condition. Instead of trying to change things to make them match what we want them to be we open the hand and let them flow through. 

“Good” or “bad” feelings are judgments. They are just “feelings.” Events. Practicing with not stepping in to try to make things better starts with little, little things: a sound, an itch, an urgent thought, an emotional sensation moving through. By allowing and letting be, we allow them to pass through. They are impermanent, and will all pass on their own in their own time. Practicing with the smallest of stuff diligently. will help us be able to practice with the bigger stuff later on. 

This is why we want to engage in a process that is not meant to make us feel better. (End of teaching transcript.)

ADDENDUM:
In their incredibly insightful book, Who Dies? An Investigation of Conscious Living and Conscious Dying (1982), Stephen and Ondrea Levine say this: 

"It is important to recognize that there are various levels and intensities of pain. That all pains may not be able to be opened to with the same ease or perhaps even opened to at all. If we have waited until 'the great pain' to open, it is quite possible that we will not have the spaciousness for deeper examination, because there has been so little preparation for such openness. But if we begin to play the edge of lesser pains, disappointments, fears, the wobblings of the mind, the contractions of the heart, in a gentle day-to-day meeting and expansion, it prepares us for what comes later. It is the daily opening to the little pains that prepares us for the great pain. Playing the edge of our pain should be done with great compassion (p. 125)."

Practice with the small stuff.

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