Release the Chains of Suffering: How to balance desire and motivation

We live in a world that in many ways is filled with suffering. People suffer for want when they lack the basics of survival like food, water, and shelter. People that obtain those basics still suffer for want as they strive to obtain security, stability, comfort and love. Yet even still people that are lucky enough to be blessed with family, friends, economic abundance, physical security and health still suffer because they strive for something more. They strive for superficialities like fame, extreme wealth, or fleeting momentary pleasures from sex, drugs or near death experiences. We always seem to want more. We always desire more than what we have, and that is why we suffer. Buddhist practice teaches us that the path to end suffering starts by giving up attachment and desire. But shouldn’t we always strive to be better? Shouldn’t we push ourselves away from comfort to achieve our dreams? Why is it a bad thing to desire? Doesn’t the desire for something greater and the work necessary to achieve that benefit ourselves as well as all of humanity? Here we find one of the most difficult yet also one of the most delicate balancing acts in our lives. How do we better ourselves and our world without subjecting ourselves to perpetual suffering?

You have heard me and a million other motivational speakers encourage you to be happy with your present condition. Of course, I believe happiness is something we can choose to have regardless of our situation, and that choosing to be happy will make improving your situation so much easier. But in extreme settings (like those I mentioned in the beginning that are lacking the basic physiological needs) being content with your present condition and doing nothing to remedy your lack of food, water or shelter will lead to your death. One step up the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs we reach the less immediate basic needs of safety and security. Does it truly make any sense to tell someone in immediate danger not to try to remedy the situation? I don’t know how much luck you would have telling a guy inside of a burning building to be happy in this present moment, and to not suffer by desiring better.

So where do you draw the line? At what point can you truthfully tell someone they will be better off giving up the desire for something better for their current condition to avoid the suffering of desire? At what point does the suffering of want outweigh the suffering of desire?

I believe the secret is not in the art of giving things up, but fully relies on the mental state you choose to have in any given situation. You can build yourself a home without choosing to suffer because of your lack of one. You can work for money, garden for food, learn for knowledge, exercise for health and travel for experience all without going into those situations with a mental state centered around your lack of the desired outcome. An end point to your desires will never exist, you will never hit a point where your mind will suddenly think “that is it, we have accomplished it, we don’t need anything else now.” If you base your happiness on this end goal, you will never be happy. You are basing your happiness on the elimination of your desire, while you continue to feed that desire. Instead of focusing on what you desire, focus on the present moment and make your actions create what you need.

If you are in immediate danger, you can remedy that situation to the best of your ability in every present moment, but you will never reach a time where you will be completely safe and indestructible. If you base your happiness on the desire to be invincible, you will always desire and you will always suffer.

If you are hungry, you can work for money, garden or forage for food, or seek the kindness of others to remedy this, but if your happiness is based on overcoming this desire, you will always find unhappiness in a couple of hours.

If you want to be successful, whether that means amassing wealth or if that means you want to help humanity in some way through your labors (or both) then you can choose to work towards that in this present moment without forcing your mind to live in a state of want, focused on nothing but the desire to be at the end of that road, suffering throughout the amazing journey made of trillions of moments you have given up for an imaginary world. Suffering arises not from the actions you take to better yourself, but the desire and attachment you have to an end point that will never truly exist.

The examples can go on and on, but the point is the same; suffering is always a choice. You can better your life, from basic survival to your wildest dreams, in every present moment without being a slave to desire. When you attach your mind to some want that is beyond the present moment, you give up that moment of your life…you give up the chance to be happy in that present moment. You don’t need to give up on making your life and the world a better place in order to be free of the slavery of desire. The secret lies in the choices you make in every moment of life, the only time that is real. Are you choosing to suffer because of your lack? Are you choosing to suffer because of your attachment to a future desire? Are you choosing to let your life and the world around you suffer because you are afraid that taking action in this moment to better yourself takes you away from the inner peace that freeing yourself from attachment and desire is promised to give you in the Buddhist practice?

In this moment you must choose to be free of suffering. When it is said to free yourself from desire and attachment in order to rid yourself of suffering, it does not mean you can’t better your life or achieve greatness, it only means that in order for you to find peace and happiness on your journey you must let go of the way desire and attachment can control you mentally, telling you to suffer until you reach some imaginary end goal where all is perfect. Choose to be happy regardless of what point on the spectrum of needs you are at. Choose to be happy pushing forward, choose to be happy if you lose it all and have to climb again.

Attaching yourself and your happiness to a future fantasy is like chaining your mind to inevitable suffering. You must release your mind from the chains of suffering no matter where you are on your journey. They can keep you from ever starting your climb, they can make you suffer at every step, and they can even keep you suffering when you have climbed to unimaginable heights. There is no point on this journey where the chains of suffering won’t pull you down and make you think you must out climb their grasp. Release your mind from those chains and see how freely you can climb or how happily you can sit still.

It was always a choice and it will always be one.