Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha

The story of the Buddha may seem far removed from our everyday reality, but his life, both before and after his awakening, offers us a model for our own lives. Probably all of us can relate to the suffering that seems to be unavoidable in life. In some way or another, the signs of aging, sickness, or death have touched us all. We’ve experienced the truth of impermanence—the highs and pleasures we achieved in our addictions always eventually wore off, but we kept chasing them anyway. We’ve endured other forms of suffering, some of it self-inflicted and some at the hands of others. And we’ve dealt with the subtle forms of dukkha: the annoyances with others, the boredom, the loss of what we want, the inability to keep what we have, the impatience with life, the refusal to accept what is. And what have we done with these experiences of suffering? Maybe we tried to change them. Maybe we tried to avoid them. Maybe we tried to find something more pleasurable to replace what was unpleasant.

It’s at this point that most of our stories start to look different than Siddhartha’s, and it’s this difference that led us to this program. Instead of deeply understanding suffering, we found ways to avoid it or replace it with something we found more pleasurable. For some of us, that came in the form of drinking or using. For others, it came in the form of sex, relationships, food, self harming, technology addiction, workaholism, or gambling. And for a lot of us, our stories contain some version of “all of the above.” Whatever our behavior was, we found that it was just a temporary solution that always led to deeper suffering for ourselves and others.