“‘But this is not to be achieved by wanting,’ is the saddest sentence in the whole thing, the crux of everything. That should be written on my gravestone. It’s all the pain, all the sorrow, all the despair, and the lamentation. We can’t wish things to be true. We can’t will things into being.” - Emily Eslami
Emily wraps up her series on the three marks of existence with Buddhism's favorite least favorite topic - The Truth of Suffering. She leads the sangha in an acknowledgement of all the large and small ways we experience suffering on a daily basis and then goes into the ways we exacerbate that and compound the problem with the classic parable of the second arrow. Drawing on both straightforward teachings of classical Buddhism and the more open ended Zen approach she explores the ways that suffering is both an inherent product of life and also far more avoidable than we might think.