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Dr. Zack Bein

Working with Difficult Mind States

One of the more common questions I get from my clients and students is how to deal with unpleasant emotions and mind states as they arise in meditation and throughout the day. It’s a big question with many right answers. And the answers differ, depending on the context and the client’s meditation skills. So let’s break it down, using doubt as an example of an unpleasant mind state.

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Dr. Zack Bein

Finding Peace Wherever You Are

In times of crisis, it becomes important to develop and draw on our inner strength. The forced pause on all of our lives has created a paradigm shift that calls for an entirely new set of priorities and behavioral maxims. But we know how to do this.

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Dr. Zack Bein

On Human Suffering

The topic of human suffering has always fascinated me. It wasn’t until about five years ago that I realized that we spend so much of our life’s energy on futile attempts to avoid suffering. We use drugs and alcohol, denial, dishonesty, and dissociation. Sometimes it seems like we spend our entire lives trying to avoid suffering and increase pleasure. What I have come to realize, through different spiritual texts, spiritual practice, and simply my own experience, is that suffering is an inevitable part of human existence. This we cannot change. No amount of running or hiding, and certainly no substance can change that fact. What we can change, through meditation, is our relationship to that suffering. Maybe the fact that painful events exist in life is not by itself a cause for true suffering. It is our constant aversive relationship to that pain that creates true suffering.

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