Don't Believe Everything You Think: Why Your Thinking Is the Beginning & End of Suffering

“Life does not have to be this way. Life is not suffering. Suffering is part of life, but it does not have to be the majority of it. You are not fundamentally broken. You are not a problem to be fixed but a human who is meant to be understood. Through understanding yourself and how your experience of life is created in the mind, you can find peace.”

While Nguyen is heavily reliant on Buddhist concepts for many of his teachings, here he breaks with a key tenet of Buddhism. Buddha holds that life itself is suffering. Nguyen rejects this and holds that it is possible to live without suffering (or at least much less). One can have the peace normally associated with enlightenment without actually achieving a higher mental plane.

“The words in this book are not the truth; they point to the truth. Truth cannot be intellectualized; it can only be experienced. It is within everyone and everything. But you must look beyond the form (the physical) to see and experience the truth (spiritual).”

Many self-help books aim to offer secret wisdom that unlocks knowledge or experience reserved for a select few. Nguyen takes a completely different approach, offering his work as a means of pointing out what the reader already knows and is fully capable of achieving with or without him. He is simply there to point the way.

“Pain is unavoidable, but how we react to that pain is up to us, and that reaction will dictate whether or not we suffer. Now, I’m not saying that the difficult experiences we’ve been through are all in our heads. On the contrary, terrible and unfortunate things happen to people every single day. I’m saying that although we invariably experience pain in our lives, suffering is optional.”

The first key distinction that Nguyen makes is between pain and suffering. Pain is a physical phenomenon that exists objectively—the body recognizes it and responds accordingly. Suffering, however, is in the mind. This does not mean that suffering can or ought to be eliminated in all forms—there are plenty of legitimate causes for negative emotions. The key is not to let suffering take hold, and to realize that it is possible to manage it.