Up until now, my practice had, of course, considered suffering and self; after all, they make the obligatory appearance in most of my stories. But, they had always been an appetizer, maybe a big kale salad,  sometimes the all important desert (I have a sweet tooth). But they were rarely the main course. That honor generally went to impermanence or other interesting Buddhisty stuff like karma and aggregates ( had I been paying close enough attention, I would have noticed karma and the aggregates are really just fancier frameworks in which to think about suffering and self, but I am not always the swiftest student on the path…) . Anyway, around Sept. 2014 that began to change and I made a big push for looking at suffering, self, and ultimately the connection between the two, head-on.

Ironically suffering and self are sort of the headline acts in Buddhism. The problem statement is that this world contains a ton of suffering (and our selfs are the ones experiencing it). The Buddha’s sales pitch is essentially that there is a way out of suffering and, if you followed his program, he’ll lead the way. The practice itself is in fact moving from suffering to freedom from suffering and seeing the role of our big fat selves is a critical part of that path. So after a lot of prior ado … let me introduce the stars of tonight’s show, suffering and my self…