metonymy4u

These days we should be just as concerned with the very question that was asked 2500 years ago by both the Buddha and Plato of Athens: How can we understand human suffering (emotional pain) and alleviate it? The Buddha said that pain is caused by 3 things: being alive in a mortal body, being separated from things we want or need, and awareness of change. But the good news is that in this awareness is also the relief of suffering, for as we become aware of habitual desire and avoidance, we can develop a different relationship to pain and suffering and respond more effectively to the way things are. One of the things that humans need, as a social animal, is connection. Connection reduces stress hormones which can damage the brain and body, increases helpful chemicals like oxytocin and helps us recover from suffering. In this way what modern people might think of as “therapy” could be transformed into a fulfillment of humanity’s age old dream: how to create healthy connections between people? The modern world is a world beset with challenges our brains were never designed for, and in this world we are more separated, more depressed, more anxious, more intoxicated and more aggressive than I bet we ever have been in our entire history on this planet. It seems to me that we desperately need just this sort of adaptation of effective emotional coping and connection building tools. The ingredients of modern “therapy,” it seems to me are readily adaptable to a more vernacular dissemination. People readily understand the stress of the constant barrage of bells and whistles, the intrusions of TV, of worries about not so distant war and injustice, and the suffering of isolation. Books like Daniel Goleman’s “Emotional Intelligence,” and the work of the Dalai Lama have paved the way for teaching emotional coping and connection skills. I think all we need to do is to redescribe what we’ve learned from 2500 years of science in order to bring the benefits to more people.