Suffering is -Your conditioned mind living your life and you not knowing that. Your mind is forever trying to control the natural flow of life to the point there is no flow left, only stuck ideas in your head. There is only one grief- that you are not happy with what is happening right now. Events, situations and emotions don't hurt, your need to control and resist them, hurts. You sit in the way mentally obstructing everything that wants to happen. You put up a great fight and then wonder why there is no peace!
When you can recognize that whatever is happening right now is merely ''the flavour of the moment'', you can allow that flavour rather than keep insisting on your favourite one. In allowing misery cannot stay. Allowing is the antidote to suffering.
The conditioned mind cannot allow. It is an insecure mechanism, so it meddles, projects that it knows and is well-equipped to find solutions, digging a deeper hole for you all the time. The conditioned mind is invested in being your master, it does not care about your peace. It will have you hang upside down for a bit of praise. You see that happening all around you. Your mind is very creative, just that its direction is opposite to your Dharma. Your mind knows all the right concepts and yet you suffer...what does that tell you?
Unless you can allow, bow down, and surrender to what this moment is doing to you, there is no chance of peace. The conditioned mind functions in a way that existence should bow down and surrender to it. it is moving in the wrong direction. The direction of the mind comes right with receptivity. A movement of surrender and letting go is a shift in consciousness, which happens with receptivity, never by the efforts of your mind. It burns in the purifying fires of grace until its true essence remains. Then you are free of your own conditioned mind.
A Spiritual journey is to become free of the conditioned mind and merge into what was before the conditioning commenced.
No one moves forward an inch without receptivity. Receptivity is the key.
Receptivity is the ultimate intelligence
Hari Om