Four Nutriments to Ease Your Suffering

          One of the main focuses of Buddhism is to remove the suffering from your life. The practice recognizes multiple causes of suffering and has developed many ways to rid the suffering from one's life. By following the steps of the Noble Eightfold Path, or the Four Noble Truths, one can reach the point of no suffering. One of the first steps to the Four Noble Truths is recognizing your own suffering and then understanding why this suffering is present in your life. The Buddha stated: "When something has come to be, we have to acknowledge its presence and look deeply into its nature. When we look deeply, we will discover the kinds of nutriments that can lead to our  happiness or our suffering (31)." He then identified these four nutriments to be edible food, sense impressions, intention, and consciousness.
 

           The first nutriment, edible food, focuses on the physical things that enter your body. It acknowledges that what enters our body can cause suffering in either physical or mental ways. Filtering out the consumption of the harmful foods and substances that enter our bodies to only what is helpful to our health can decrease our suffering and even our children's suffering. By putting toxins into our body and destroying our health, we will not live to be as healthy as possible for our children and this will cause them pain. I can relate to this because both my father and my boyfriend smoke cigarettes. Although this has no effect on my own body and my own health, I know that their health is being affected and that causes me to worry. I worry about the future not having my father around as long as I could, and I worry for myself and my future children that they will be cut short of their time with their father. Although there is no effects present now, I know the significant effects and diseases caused by smoking for the future. If they were not smoking, I would have one less worry and struggle in my life.
      
          The second nutriment is sense impressions. This focuses on your use of the six senses: eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind. What we read, what TV shows we watch, the music we listen to, and the movies we go see have a bigger effect on our conscious than most people think. What our senses come in contact with are essentially the "food" to our conscious, and can have the same effects as the edible food we consume. The angry, violent, sexual, and scary things that we consume with our senses can lead to a anxious or nervous conscious. If we are mindful of what we ingest, and only ingest the "healthy" foods to our conscious, we will also experience a decrease in suffering. I realized the significant effect horror movies had on me when I watched my first one in the sixth grade. As a

child, I was prohibited by my strict mother to not watch any movies with intense villains, magic, or horror at all, including most disney princess movies. So, when I finally convinced her to let me watch something scary, I had a very traumatic experience and had trouble sleeping for weeks. Since then, I have tried to stay away from scary movies as much as possible. Even slight evil in any movies can give me nightmares and cause me stress. By being mindful of what I read and watch however, I believe I am significantly decreasing the presence of nightmares or other stresses and struggles caused by them.

          The third nutriment is volition, intention, or will. This is considered "the desire in us to obtain whatever it is that we want (34)." Everyone has created goals or has a motivating force pushing us to achieve what we want. However, the Buddha encourages us to pay close attention to what exactly is motivating us. This motivation can come from something that is not positive, and that can cause us to suffer: "We need the insight that position, revenge, wealth, fame, or possessions are, more often than not, obstacles to our happiness (35)." This nutriment is something I know that I have trouble with. As someone coming from a family that has constant employment and financial struggles, I know the importance of money. More often than not, I find myself focusing on how much something will cost me or how
much money I will make in the future. When I see the future I often strive to be in a place where I don't have to worry about money; in fact, during our first meditation one of the first things I thought of when asked what I was striving for in my life was to not worry about money. I know that reason is not a positive one, and I need to work on setting goals based on what will make me truly happy.
  
        The fourth and final nutriment is consciousness. Every aspect of our lives feed into our consciousness and nourish it in different ways. We have a choice how we feed our conscious, with love, compassion, joy and equanimity, or with greed, hatred, ignorance, suspicion, and pride. Our consciousness is constantly changing, made up of our past experiences. By allowing harmful things to enter our conscious, we are destroying it, and harming ourselves. This struggle can be changed by only allowing the good to enter our conscious. I often allow my past mistakes to radiate through my life. These past actions haunt my conscious and I haven't put enough love and compassion from myself into my conscious. I believe that your mindset about yourself has a lot to do with the "health" of your conscious, and building the confidence and love for myself will ultimately give me a healthier conscious with less suffering.

        By being mindful of what my body, senses, and conscious ingest I know that I can cause less suffering in my life. I know that this can also affect the people around me, and I am hopeful people important to me will follow in my footsteps to a nutriment-filled life.