Future Suffering is to be Avoided

YS II.16 Heyam duhkham anāgatam Translation: Future suffering is to be avoided.

This sūtra is one of my favourites because it has an “objects in the mirror maybe closer than they appear” quality to it. It is situated fairly early in the second chapter of Patanjali’s Yoga Sūtra. It is in a section where he is really going in on the nature of our suffering. After listing and defining the five kleśa, or ways that we cause ourselves to suffer, he gets even more specific: we suffer when we are confused about prakriti (our material self, our embodied self) and puruša (this other thing that needs a body but isn’t the body).

Usually, suffering happens we misunderstand the qualities of prakriti, which are ever changing and impermanent or we wish them to be different than they are. Each of us has a seemingly unending way of manifesting that misunderstanding. Our job as students of Yoga is to investigate our own particular version of this. Patanjali recommends kriya yoga as defined in YS II.1 (Tapah svādyaya iśvaraprānidhana kriya yogah) as the way to do this. He later explains that the result of kriya yoga is viveka kyati or the ability to discern between prakriti and puruša. This is key to reducing or eliminating suffering.

It is easy to write all of that in a few sentences but, really, it is the work of a lifetime. Many lifetimes, in fact.

Hiranyāgarbha, Tempera with gold, C.1800. From Tantra Art by Arjit Mookerjee

When I first heard sūtra II.16, I heard it as, “You should avoid suffering at all costs.”

It’s not unreasonable that this is how I heard it. There are plenty of messages out there suggesting that suffering is some kind of personal failure. In fact, there are strong forces telling us that our suffering is a mistake: think of every advertisement everywhere.

I want to take a moment here to make a distinction between suffering and unhappiness. These strong forces don’t make this distinction but it is important. No one - even the Buddha himself - has ever been happy all the time. Unhappiness is a normal emotion and part of the human condition, just as happiness is too. To use Yoga terms, our emotions are part of our prakriti. They are a normal piece of being embodied.

To dig in a little further, we might investigate what it means to have preferences, which is another way of understanding happiness and unhappiness. Liking some things and not liking others doesn’t automatically mean suffering but, as Patanjali tells us with the kleśa, they can trip us up if we stuck in our preferences. The process of kriya yoga (making an effort, observing ourselves as we make those efforts and releasing our sense of expectation and judgement about the whole thing) reveals, over time, that we have developed patterns of feelings and behaviours related to our preferences. These patterns also need not be a problem and they certainly are not a moral failure. But! They can cause suffering if we are not aware of them as patterns.

Here is a recent example in my life. In my role as a visual artist, I applied to half a dozen things in the past several months - exhibition proposals, artist residencies, etc.. Every single one was rejected. I wasn’t please about this! I felt disappointed and sad because now these projects may not happen. This is like a reasonable feeling - I don’t have pretend that it didn’t hurt. In fact, pretending I didn’t mind also would be a cause of future suffering. For me, in this example, however, there was a moment when my disappointment started to shift from, “Darn! I really wanted that!” to “what’s wrong with me? Why does everyone hate my art. Maybe everyone hates me….”

This moment, when that shift began, is heyam duhkham anāgatam. It is an alarm bell ringing - Alert! Alert! Alert!

There is absolutely nothing wrong with feeling disappointed and sad about not being selected for those programs. I care about what I do and a reflection of that caring includes feeling disappointed and sad when my chosen community rejects my offerings. The heyam duhkham anāgatam alarm bell rings when I wanted to take my sincere feelings and turn them into something more. I wanted to add to them a story about myself that is guaranteed suffering (“everyone hates me.”). Attaching my worth as person to acceptance or non-acceptance of art project proposals is for sure setting myself up for future suffering.

This pattern of thinking around disappointment is very old and deep. I engaged it and strengthened it for a long time without being aware that it arises from a set of causes and conditions and it doesn’t define me. Given its longevity and depth, it is very convincing. Again, my work as a student of Yoga, is to come to know this pattern in all its guises. This is “the object in the mirror is closer than it appears.” Rather than seeing suffering as something to be avoided at all costs, it is the alarm bell ringing, telling me: come closer. Come closer because I have entered into a pattern that is harmful. Pay attention!

Rather than running away from my duhkhā or suffering, getting closer, looking closer, allows me to become very intimate with it. Every time I do that rather than running away or making that trench of “everyone hates me” deeper, it gets less and less convincing. Then I can see it for what it is - an old pattern, created at some point as a protective measure. It needs befriending, not blungeoning.

This is how, slowly over time, we reduce future suffering. It is, in fact, the opposite of avoidance.

Do you have an old pattern that no longer serves but loves to pop in and say hello? Let me know in the comments below!