Dukka

Mark Epstein, M.D.

In the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, he suggested that our lives are colored by a pervasive feeling of unsatisfactoriness. 

 

He used the words dukka to describe this feeling and said that it was one of the fundamental characteristics of psychological experience. We want what we can't have and don't want what we do have, we want more of what we like and less of what we don't like. 

We are always a little bit hungry, or a little bit defensive, anticipating the slipping away of what we have worked so hard to achieve. 

Behind every suffering, Buddhist teachers say, is the desire for things to be different. 

This attempt to control or manage what cannot be changed interferes with our going on being. ~ Mark Epstein
Quote from: Going on Being