Don't Expect Dharma to Make You Feel Better

In fact, it may make you feel worse

These days mindfulness meditation, based on Buddhist sources, is sold as an optimization strategy to improve one’ mental state and as an important part of one’s wellness plan.

None of the above has anything to do with the Dharma. The experience of positive mental factors has nothing to do with “feeling good.” “Feeling good” generally refers to an absence of worry about negative phenomena, such as illness, aging, and death— everything that goes along with the three kinds of suffering.

To recap, the three kinds of suffering are suffering of suffering, suffering of change, and the suffering of compounded phenomena.

There is a legendary story of someone asking the 16th Karmapa why they didn’t feel better after practicing Buddhism for many years. His reply, apparently was, “Why did you expect samsara to get better?”

Samsara does not get better, ever, anywhere, at any time, for anyone, at all, no exceptions.

Does this mean we must feel miserable? No, only when we feel miserable do we to feel miserable. In fact, knowing that samsara will never feel better should make us happy, for therein lay the seeds of the desire to escape.

From these seeds, we can begin to cultivate the limbs of the path. Path dharmas, such as faith (śraddha), effort, mindfulness, samadhi, and wisdom, while not making us feel better, give us the relief of knowing that we are doing something concrete to address the existential question all Buddhists should realize as essential—how to be free from afflictive birth.

So the next time you feel like life sucks, and it will never get better, cheer up, because it is true, it won’t. But that does not mean you cannot do anything about it. You can. You can hear the Dharma, reflect on the Dharma, and cultivate the Dharma through personal discipline, authentic contemplation practice, and wisdom.