How to Suffer Less

(Based on a talk I gave at LessOnline 2026 titled “How to get Enlightened” that had similar content but a different framing. I think this is a better framing for the Internet where I have less ability to respond to questions in real time and I don’t need to bait you into attending the session.)

Suffering sucks. It would be better if there were less suffering. Some suffering can be reduced by improving material conditions, and we should do that whenever reasonable. But other suffering is self-inflicted, caused by a desire to be someone other than who we are, and no amount of material comfort will fix it. Such suffering often feels intractable, but it’s possible to free ourselves from it, and we can do that by practicing awakening, compassion, and liberation.

Awakening is fully realizing that you are not yourself. That is, the idea of the self that we call “I” or “me” is not the whole of the being who calls themselves “I” or “me”. This realization is not so hard to understand in theory, but to actually awaken, it must run through every thought and action of every moment of every day. As I often frame it, it’s not enough to have a System 2 understanding of awakening; it must be understood completely by System 1. This is why it’s so often said that awakening is not something to be achieved but something to be continually practiced.

Most people who awaken experience deep compassion for all being because awakening shows them that there’s no real separation between self and other. Not “beings”, mind you, because the plural implies a separation that awakening sees through, but “being” that includes everything and leaves nothing out. It’s, to paraphrase the Dao De Jing, loving the world as yourself and so caring for all things.

But awakening and compassion alone don’t end suffering. That requires liberation from habituated behavior. Habits, while at times useful, separate you from reality, because they aren’t grounded in the present moment, but in the reification of past moments. This doesn’t mean habits have no value, but you have to be able to break habits whenever necessary, especially in support of compassionate action.

All three of awakening, compassion, and liberation are needed to end suffering. Without awakening, compassion and liberation can cause delusion. Without compassion, awakening and liberation can enable evil. And without liberation, awakening and compassion easily lead to pathological altruism. It’s only with the continual practice of all three that suffering is truly abated.

That sounds nice and all, but how do you actually do it? How do you awaken? How do you find compassion? And how do you free yourself from habituated actions to actually reduce suffering?

There’s many possible ways to do it. Herein, I’ll describe what I did and am still doing.

Surround Yourself with Wholesome Friends

It’s difficult to do any of the work to free yourself from suffering if you’re surrounded by people who don’t support you. You need people who build you up rather than tear you down. People who want you to have a great life rather than one that serves them. And so the most important thing is to surround yourself with wholesome friends.

“Friends” here can also mean family, but we can’t choose our family, and not all of us are lucky. Yet, we shouldn’t cut difficult family members out. Surrounding ourselves with wholesome friends doesn’t mean cutting out every toxic person from our lives. There will always be difficult people in our lives and we have to learn to deal with them. The choice is in how much power we let them have over our lives, and we can and should find ways to protect ourselves from the harm that others would cause us.

From wholesome friends, we can also learn how to be a wholesome friend to others. Small acts of service, done not with the intent of gaining something, but simply to express our love and affection for others, can be a powerful way to grow the strength of our compassion.

Meditate

Spend at least 30 minutes a day meditating. Specifically, I recommend practicing zazen, because it’s the kind of meditation that works for me. Other kinds of meditation may work better for you, but I can’t confidently recommend them since they aren’t what I practice.

What is zazen? It’s simply being with nothing extra. You can do it sitting or standing or walking or lying down, so long as you just sit or just stand or just walk or just lie down. All you have to do is set the intention not to chase or engage with thoughts and feelings and sensations and instead allow whatever arises in your experience to be as it is.

If you’d like some zazen instructions, I suggest this post I wrote that includes a more detailed model of how to sit zazen.

Study the Self

Awakening and liberation depend largely on getting to know yourself well enough to see the machinery of self in action. Some of this self study will happen during meditation, but usually that’s not enough. It certainly isn’t for me, and it isn’t for most people I know also working to free themselves from suffering.

One technique I’ve found that works well is Gendlin’s Focusing. It helps me get to know the parts of myself that would otherwise be invisible. Over time, I’ve made the process my own, so I don’t do it exactly the way Gendlin describes it, but I keep to the core of noticing sensations and seeing what they have to tell me.

Deal with Your Hangups

Once the self is known, we see the parts of it that get in the way of living life wholeheartedly. This consists of what some people call trauma, but what I’d more conservatively call maladaptive behaviors. Retraining ourselves to have adaptive behaviors unblocks the way to freeing ourselves from suffering.

Alas, this is hard work to do, because these maladaptive behaviors are often load bearing, or at least, we believe they are. Sometimes that’s because they were once adaptive, no longer are, but we still believe they’re adaptive and are afraid to test them. Other times it’s because they’re adaptive in limited ways, trapping us at a local maximum, and we know it will be painful to let them go and make our lives temporarily worse as we search for new, better behavioral patterns.

I’ve found the practice of memory reconsolidation really useful for dealing with maladaptive behaviors. It’s simple, effective, and even when it doesn’t work, the fact that it didn’t work gives me clues about what I need to learn about myself in order to find my way to making it work.

Live in Your Body

For much of my life, I didn’t live in my body. Instead, I lived in my model of my body, and, indeed, my map of the whole world instead of the actual world. It was like I thought of myself as a homunculus, sitting inside my brain, driving around this human called “Gordon”.

This kind of self model is incompatible with awakening, and the best way to fix it is by getting better connected with your body. What worked for me was practicing Alexander Technique with a teacher. What seems to work for others are things like energy work or martial arts or playing sports. And some people don’t have this problem at all. But if you’re like me, consider that you might be disassociating from yourself 100% of the time, and you can change that, and must if you want to stop suffering.

Learn to See Others

Although awakening dissolves the self-other distinction as essential, it’s still practically useful to think about yourself and others. And when seeing others, it’s easy to confuse them for being too much like the self or not enough like it. What I mean by this is there’s typically two failure modes: the typical mind fallacy and dehumanization (”debeingization”?). They work in opposite directions, but result in similar outcomes: others are not truly seen, and because they aren’t seen, compassion for them is insufficient.

For myself, learning to see others was hard. For most of my life I struggled with modeling other people, and wasn’t that good at modeling myself, either. Some of that changed as I progressed towards awakening, developing the ontological complexity necessary to make sense of other people, but what really helped was doing meditation practices to exchange self and other.

One such practice that’s popular is tonglen. Another is metta meditation. Other practices can also help, as can working closely with others. This is one of the true gifts of practicing in a community, like a sangha, because being so close with other people doing the same work you are, you can learn something about how to care not just for yourself, but for all.

Cultivate Deep Insight

All of the above was necessary, and also not enough. I’ve found it necessary to go on occasional meditation retreats and take moderate doses of psychedelics. The psychedelics have been safe for me, but are optional; retreats alone are probably sufficient, and the further I’ve gone down this path, the less I’ve found psychedelics interesting or useful.

Some way of getting deep insight is what’s needed, though. There are insights that are hard to come by meditating only 30 minutes a day. Some things require sustained attention to see.

Be careful trying to see them, though! It’s important that deep insight comes only occasionally, as it typically takes weeks to months to make sense of it and integrate it before being ready for more insight. A reasonable schedule is getting experiences to cultivate deep insight every two to four months, though adjusted to whatever feels right for you.

Trust

The central thing keeping you from waking up right now is a lack of trust. Generally this is a lack of trust that things are okay as they are, but specifically it’s a lack of trust dependent on your personal hangups.

For example, I have a hard time trusting that my experience is real or authentic enough. I’m better about it now, but to wake up I had to deeply get that “it’s all fake” and trust that was okay. For other people, their lack of trust is different. They don’t trust their own value, or safety, or freedom, or rightness. For them waking up might mean trusting that “my life matters” or “I’m already safe” or “I’m already free” or “everything’s perfect”.

My current theory is that the Enneagram is a map to the different kinds of distrust people have that prevents them from waking up. Knowing that we need to cultivate this trust isn’t enough to actually trust, but it is enough to get us to look at the right questions and hopefully eventually discover that our distrust was never well-founded.

Wayfinding

I’m sure I’ve left things out of the above. My list only contains those things that were salient to me, because some things that I do automatically, others struggle with, just as things I struggle with others find easy. Ending suffering requires some degree of active wayfinding, paying attention to what keeps grabbing your attention and finally looking at it closely without flinching away.

Hopefully you found this useful. I don’t mean for it to be overly prescriptive, but instead a description of what worked for me, and if you’re trying to do the same as me, then it might work for you, too.