Feeding as Suffering

Looking at experience in terms of the five aggregates helps us to focus our attention on what the Buddha says is our fundamental activity as beings: beings have to eat. This is how they continue to be. Without taking in food—physical, mental, and emotional—we couldn’t maintain our identity as beings.

Now the Buddha wants us to perceive this feeding as suffering, because only when we get past this kind of activity can we find a true state of happiness. But because our identity is centered on feeding, this perception goes against the grain. We normally turn a blind eye to the suffering that our feeding causes, largely because we can’t imagine not feeding; we don t want to look too closely at the harm we’re doing. We don t even think of what we’re doing as feeding.

A lot of the training lies in sensitizing ourselves to what we’re doing as we feed, so that we’ll be more inclined to give the Buddha the benefit of the doubt— maybe there is something better than the identity we create out of feeding; maybe there’s an experience of happiness that doesn’t need to feed.

• This reflection by Ajahn Geoff is from the book, Karma of MIndfulness, p. 130.