Cecile’s Reviews > True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart > Status Update

"We know well that suffering helps us to understand, that it nurtures our compassion, and that for this reason it is vitally necessary for us. So we must know how to learn from suffering, we must know how to make use of it to gather the energy of compassion, of love, of understanding."

"If a person has never suffered, he or she will never be able to know happiness. [...] Thus pain and suffering are a necessary condition of our understanding, of our happiness. So do not say that you do not want to know anything about pain or about suffering, that you only want to know about happiness - that would be an impossible thing."

"The same is true of our mental formations, which include flowers like faith, hope, understanding, and love; but there is also waste material like fear and pain. The flower is on its way to becoming refuse, but the refuse is also on its way to becoming a flower. This is the nonduality principle of Buddhism: there is nothing to throw away."

This passage is important. Thich Nhat Hanh describes the way in which we can turn our suffering into joy, and how we can't have happiness without first having suffered, having know pain.