8. Gain and Loss

In this episode of the Spiritual Sobriety Podcast, Chris explores:

• The eight worldly preoccupations and how they drive our suffering
• How our egoic thinking mind generates thousands of feelings from every perception
• The Buddhist teaching of the Two Arrows and how we wound ourselves twice
• Practical tools from both Buddhism and the 12 Steps to respond with loving-kindness

This episode is for you if:

• You've been feeling trapped by emotions you can't seem to control
• You're stuck in patterns of grabbing for comfort or pushing away discomfort
• You're ready to approach your suffering with more honesty and self-compassion

The Invitation

Sobriety is not just the removal of alcohol. It is the return to your truest self.

In this conversation, we explore what it means to meet our emotions directly without being ruled by them, and how spiritual awareness can gently reshape the way you experience the push and pull of joy and suffering.

Featured Practice

Take 3-5 minutes today to try this. You will need a pen and paper.

1. Draw two columns and write these four pairings as opposites: happiness vs. suffering, fame vs. insignificance, praise vs. blame, gain vs. loss.
2. Read each term slowly and notice what sense feelings arise within you.
3. Write down the feelings that surface under each term.
4. Ask yourself: "Where do I see myself grabbing toward one side or pushing away the other?"

Let whatever arises be enough.

Journal Prompt

"What would it look like if I trusted my ability to hold both the joy and the sorrow, instead of reaching for one and running from the other?"

Write without editing. Let honesty lead.

Key Reflection

"The second arrow is always optional. The first arrow is pain. The second is the story we tell ourselves about that pain."

If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone walking their own sobriety path.

Chris McDuffie is a licensed psychotherapist, mindfulness teacher and sober coach in private practice. He is the CEO and lead therapist for Chris McDuffie Counseling, a leading concierge practice caring for mental and behavioral health needs. He lives in Carlsbad, California, and holds a  Master of Social Work from Fordham University. He teaches recovery from addiction and co-occurring disorders through the spiritual practices of Buddhism and the 12 Steps.

If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone walking their own sobriety path.

Follow Chris for reflections and meditations:
Website: https://www.chrismcduffietherapy.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chris__mcduffie/

Insight Timer: https://insighttimer.com/buddhanature

You don’t have to walk this path alone.

Transcript

0:00

Welcome. This is Spiritual Sobriety, a podcast about recovery, awakening, and learning how to live with a little more honesty, compassion, and freedom. I'm Chris McDuffie. I work as a licensed psychotherapist, meditation teacher, sober coach, and someone who has spent the past 15 years walking the path of recovery and spiritual practices. In this podcast, we explore the intersection of Buddhist wisdom and the 12 steps. Not as theories, but as lived practices. Practices that help us meet suffering directly, loosen the grip of old patterns, and remember who we are beneath the stories we carry. Each episode is an invitation to slow down, reflect, and bring these teachings into your real life. Not to just fix yourself, but to relate to yourself with more clarity and kindness. Wherever you are listening from, I'm glad you're here. Let's begin. Hi everyone. Welcome to Spiritual Sobriety. I'm your host, Chris McDuffie. For today's discussion, we will continue to look at how we cause our own suffering and how to free ourselves in order to create more joy and happiness. I welcome all of our new listeners and followers from around the world. It's great to hear your feedback each week. During last week's podcast, we considered how to balance our suffering by honoring our suffering and including the macro perspective of gratitude. We practiced generating joy and love and compassion by creating a gratitude list. We also contemplated our feelings associated with the people, places, and things that we are grateful for having in our lives, and that which sobriety affords us. We also saw that for us in recovery, practicing acts of gratitude is a powerful coping skill for managing our emotions and a powerful relapse prevention skill. Let's begin today's discussion with a new contemplative exercise. You'll need some paper and pen. You may wish to devote a notebook to the spiritual sobriety podcast each week so you can have your thoughts in one place. You will want to find Andrew Alinsky's article entitled Pleasure and Pain in Tricycle, the Buddhist Review, and Judy Leaf's August 2016 article entitled The Middle Way of Stress, published in the Buddhist journal Lion's Roar. Tricycle and Lion's Roar are two wonderful journals that you may wish to follow to enhance your learning of Buddhism. When the Buddha was becoming enlightened, he saw all of his lives, and he saw all the 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows that became part of his enlightenment path. Yep, he enumerated each one and you will notice that they are equally balanced for every thought and feeling of joy. For every feeling of joy, there's an equal opposite of sorrow. Buddha taught using dialectics and a means of instruction. Dialectical contemplation may be defined as inquiry into metaphysical contradictions and their solutions. I'd invite you to begin today's contemplative exercise by writing the following terms on each side of your page as opposites to one another. Happiness versus suffering, fame versus insignificance, praise versus blame, and gain versus loss. Again, we're creating a dialectic for each pairing. Again, happiness versus suffering, fame versus insignificance, praise versus blame, and gain versus loss. On the same side of the paper, you will now have happiness versus suffering, fame versus insignificance, praise versus blame, and gain versus loss. Next, I invite you to read each term intently and contemplate on each for a few minutes, noticing and feeling the sense feelings that arise within you. Please write down the feelings that arose under each term. You may want to pause the podcast and rejoin us in about five minutes after taking some time to think. When you're done, you may have noticed that the left column probably felt more comfortable and pleasurable than the right column. If that was the case, consider for a moment why this happened. After all, these are just words on a piece of paper. It is our egoic thinking mind fed by our fear, our experiences, and our trauma, and many other factors that generate thousands and thousands of thoughts and then feelings as we perceive every situation. You might say that every perception of every situation throughout each day will generate emotions that fall into any one of these categories. Buddha called this collection of the eight dialectics on emotions, quote, the eight worldly preoccupations. How might our addictions and our attachments and our unskillful reaction to these perceptions feed our suffering? Do we think that we could or should avoid the uncomfortable and live only in the comfortable? Do you clearly see Buddha's suggestions that our suffering is sourced from our attachments or grabbing and the dialectical opposite of aversions? Buddha discussed the concept of suffering more in his sutra on the arrow. I'd like to take you back to the paper for a few seconds and contemplate on another exercise. Take a few minutes and consider and note under each term specific examples in your past or the present moment. Notice too the thoughts and sense feelings that arise as you consider each feeling on a sheet of paper. You may want to pause the podcast again and rejoin us in a couple of minutes. If any very uncomfortable emotions should arise while you're contemplating, please seek immediate help and support from medical professionals. Our practices and our exercises are not meant to feel punitive or life-threatening. You may wish to pause the podcast yet again to contemplate some more. Consider again the mind and the heart's desire to grab onto or push away certain feelings. From today's exercise, you are practicing how to make wise-minded, safe responses that are loving and kind to yourself and others. You may wish to bring today's insight to your sponsors, your therapists, or your spiritual mentors. Reflecting back again on the sutra or teaching called the arrow, the Buddha described for us the self-inflicting wounds that cause our suffering. Consider a client whose wife divorced him in early sobriety. The first arrow is the pain and suffering that he may feel as a result of these attachments. Those attachments might certainly be, boy, I'll always have a loving, loyal wife. She'll always be by my side. Look at me, I'm somebody special with this beautiful wife next to me. Now imagine this client relapsing over the real suffering that he feels. The Buddha suggests this would be the second arrow. The Buddha would say that this gentleman now has two arrows in him, not just one. In the twelve-step program, we are encouraged in steps three to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. I choose to see God as a loving, kind God, or the God of love, or simply love itself. Step three reminds us not to harm ourselves with a second arrow after we already have turned away or been turned away from love and support from others. Dr. Jason Kim writes in his January 2015 article in PAX X Press entitled Releasing the Arrow, which he uses as an excerpt from TikTok Han's book, No Mud, No Lotus, the following Quote The welcome things that sometimes happen in life, like being rejected, losing an object, falling at failing a test, getting injured in an accident, are analogs to the first arrow. They cause the pain. The second arrow fired by ourselves is a reaction, our own storyline or our own anxiety. All these things magnify the suffering. So many times the ultimate disasters we're ruminating from don't even happen. So how have you responded to situations that you deem painful from steps one through nine? In twelve steps in Buddhism, they both help us form a non-judging, non-punitive lens to look at to see how we respond to situations with loving-kindness to ourselves and others. I hope that you found today's discussion on feelings and emotions very informative and helpful. As you practice ending your suffering, please click Follow Spiritual Sobriety so that you will automatically receive each week's new podcast. I look forward to reading your thoughts and comments and questions. Thank you. As we close, I invite you to take a moment and notice what stayed with you from this episode. You don't need to understand everything or do anything perfectly. This path unfolds one honest moment at a time. If what we explored today resonated and you feel called to go deeper, I offer one-on-one therapy and coaching for people who want personal support integrating these teachings into their lives. You can connect with me directly and learn more at Chris McDuffie Therapy.com. That's C H R I S M C D U F F I E Therapy.com. And if this podcast has been helpful, you're welcome to share it with someone who might need it, or take a moment to follow and review the show. Thank you for practicing with me. The path continues.