Question: “I’ve been reading and practicing what I’ve been learning about Buddhism for about 2.5 years now, and these practices have brought me great joy. However recently, I experienced 3 traumatic deaths within 3 months, and kind of spiraled down in school as well. I know healing comes with time, but what else can I do to make this healing process more durable? It is dragging out, I see light coming, but I often feel despair. I keep asking: How long to happiness?”
I’m sorry that you went through 3 deaths in 3 months, I know that can put a tremendous weight on our shoulders for such a long time. But as you already said, healing takes time and time is the best medicine. But of course, there are supplements we can take to help as well, which I’m sure you do already – meditation.
It’s one thing to be able to cope with death and loss, but it’s another thing to truly accept it, and that’s really the hard part. Feeling okay and being okay are two different things. We can feel okay on bad days by eating ice cream or cake, but to be okay takes effort and acceptance.
If you try to look for happiness you won’t find it. Just like breathing air, there’s no point in trying to look for it because it’s always around you, it’s always there and available. Likewise, happiness is always available, always there within you, we just can’t always see it.
Our happiness is like our reflection in the foggy mirror after taking a hot shower. Sometimes there’s so much fog that we can’t see anything, sometimes we can see the shape of what looks like us, or the vague color or our skin or hair length that people get by using the castor oil for hair growth. True happiness (our true nature; nirvana) is behind that foggy mirror. The fog is all the defilements and sufferings of our mind. So as we wipe away at the mirror to clean it up, as we wipe away suffering from our mind, we get closer and closer to seeing our true selves. And when we wipe enough away and are able to see our full reflection, we’ve wiped away all our suffering.
Death is a suffering. Why? Because we associate death with negativity, loss, abandonment, and sometimes anger and hate. But as Buddhists, we understand that death is not the end, it is only a continuation of one form of life to another. So even though 3 people died, 3 other people are born to continue their journey toward enlightenment. To overcome death as a suffering is to accept death as a natural and continual process of life.
Smile and be well!