No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

by Thich Nhat Hanh

“Most people are afraid of suffering. But suffering is a kind of mud to help the lotus flower of happiness grow. There can be no lotus flower without the mud.” —THICH NHAT HANH

If we focus exclusively on pursuing happiness, we may regard suffering as something to be ignored or resisted. We think of it as something that gets in the way of happiness. But the art of happiness is also and at the same time the art of knowing how to suffer well. If we know how to use our suffering, we can transform it and suffer much less. Knowing how to suffer well is essential to realizing true happiness.

If you can recognize and accept your pain without running away from it, you will discover that although pain is there, joy can also be there at the same time.

It is possible of course to get stuck in the “mud” of life. It’s easy enough to notice mud all over you at times. The hardest thing to practice is not allowing yourself to be overwhelmed by despair. When you’re overwhelmed by despair, all you can see is suffering everywhere you look. You feel as if the worst thing is happening to you. But we must remember that suffering is a kind of mud that we need in order to generate joy and happiness. Without suffering, there’s no happiness. So we shouldn’t discriminate against the mud. We have to learn how to embrace and cradle our own suffering and the suffering of the world, with a lot of tenderness.

If you know how to make good use of the mud, you can grow beautiful lotuses. If you know how to make good use of suffering, you can produce happiness. We do need some suffering to make happiness possible. And most of us have enough suffering inside and around us to be able to do that. We don’t have to create more.

The Buddha said that nothing can survive without food. This is true, not just for the physical existence of living beings, but also for states of mind. Love needs to be nurtured and fed to survive; and our suffering also survives because we enable and feed it. We ruminate on suffering, regret, and sorrow. We chew on them, swallow them, bring them back up, and eat them again and again. If we’re feeding our suffering while we’re walking, working, eating, or talking, we are making ourselves victims of the ghosts of the past, of the future, or our worries in the present. We’re not living our lives.

When suffering arises, the first thing to do is to stop, follow our breathing, and acknowledge it. Don’t try to deny uncomfortable emotions or push them down. Breathing in, I know suffering is there. Breathing out, I say hello to my suffering.

If we can get in touch with our body, then we can also get in touch with our feelings. There are many feelings calling to us. Every feeling is like our child. Suffering is a hurt child crying out to us. But we ignore the voice of the child within.

When we bring our mind home to our body, something wonderful happens; our mental discourse stops its chattering.

We can even smile to our suffering and say, “Good morning, my pain, my sorrow, my fear. I see you. I am here. Don’t worry.”

A mother taking care of a crying baby naturally will take the child into her arms without suppressing, judging it, or ignoring the crying. Mindfulness is like that mother, recognizing and embracing suffering without judgment. So the practice is not to fight or suppress the feeling, but rather to cradle it with a lot of tenderness. When a mother embraces her child, that energy of tenderness begins to penetrate into the body of the child. Even if the mother doesn’t understand at first why the child is suffering and she needs some time to find out what the difficulty is, just her act of taking the child into her arms with tenderness can already bring relief. If we can recognize and cradle the suffering while we breathe mindfully, there is relief already.

Many people suffer due to the fear of dying. We want to live forever. We fear annihilation. We don’t want to pass from being into nonbeing. This is understandable. If you believe that one day you will cease to exist altogether, it can be very scary. But if you take the time to still the activities of body and mind and look deeply, you may see that you are dying right this very

moment. You think that you will die in a few years, or twenty years, or thirty years. That’s not true. You are dying now. You have been dying all the time. It’s actually very pleasant to die, which is also to live.

There are many cells inside your body that are dying as you read these words. Fifty to seventy billion cells die each day in the average human adult. You are too busy to organize funerals for all of them! At the very same time, new cells are being born, and you don’t have the time to sing Happy Birthday to them. If old cells don’t die, there’s no chance for new cells to be born. So death is ...

Deep looking can dismantle these kinds of notions. There is no birth and death; everything dies and renews itself all the time. When you get that kind of insight, you no longer tire yourself out with anxiety and aversion.

Part of the art of suffering well is learning not to magnify our pain by getting carried

away in fear, anger, and despair. We build and maintain our energy reserves to handle the big sufferings; the little sufferings we can let go.

Happiness is impermanent, like everything else. In order for happiness to be extended and renewed, you have to learn how to feed your happiness. Nothing can survive without food, including happiness; your happiness can die if you don’t know how to nourish it. If you cut a flower but you don’t put it in some water, the flower will wilt in a few hours. Even if happiness is already manifesting, we have to continue to nourish it. This is sometimes called conditioning, and it’s very important. We can condition our bodies and minds to happiness with the five practices of letting go, inviting positive seeds, mindfulness, concentration, and insight.

One of the biggest cows that we have is our narrow idea of happiness. You may suffer just because of your idea; and you continue to suffer until, one day, you are capable of releasing the idea and right away you feel happy.

If we remember that suffering, not letting ourselves get carried away by it, we can use it to remind ourselves, “How lucky I am right now. I’m not in that situation. I can be happy.”—that is insight; and in that moment, our joy, and our happiness can grow very quickly.

When a young person tells his parents, “This is my body; this is my life. I can do what I want with it” he is only partly right. He doesn’t see that he is the continuation of his parents and of his ancestors before that. This body is not yours alone. It is also the body of your ancestors. Your body is a collective product of your nation, of your people, of your culture, of your ancestors. So you are not strictly an individual. You are partly collective.