One of the things I’ve learned through study and experience of the teachings of the Buddha is that the four noble truths are about changing our relationship to suffering. On Twitter recently I talked about how I changed my relationship to a difficult part of my past. The gist of my point there was that we’ll never be free of misery while we’re human — but we can learn to better integrate that suffering into a happy life.

So it’s in that frame of mind that I read this article on the return of psychoanalysis after decades of the standardization of cognitive behavioral therapy. One of the key differences, the piece argues, between the psychoanalytic approach and more recently developed forms of therapy is that in psychoanalysis it’s understood that one can’t be “therapy’d” into a life that’s free of suffering.

Studies measure relief of symptoms — yet a crucial premise of psychoanalysis is that there’s more to a meaningful life than being symptom-free. In principle, you might even end a course of psychoanalysis sadder — though wiser, more conscious of your previously unconscious responses, and living in a more engaged way — and still deem the experience a success. Freud famously declared that his goal was the transformation of “neurotic misery into common unhappiness”. Carl Jung said “humanity needs difficulties: they are necessary for health.” Life is painful. Should we be thinking in terms of a “cure” for painful emotions at all?

Life is painful, as the first noble truth tells us. The first noble truth is a problem psychoanalysts & cognitive behavioral therapists attempt to solve— and thankfully the Buddha offers us an attempt to solve this problem too. Our suffering is caused by the craving that is the natural byproduct of being a human being. This is the 2nd noble truth. It is natural for us to desire that our life be different from the way it is right now: warmer, or more financially secure, or safer, or nearer to lunchtime.

What Freud called “common unhappiness” might also be termed dukkha, or even more familiarly, “the human condition.”

That is to say, if you’re unhappy with some aspect of your life — and who isn’t? — there’s nothing wrong with you for being unhappy, for desiring that something in your life be different from the way that it is. The Buddha’s point in making the Second Noble Truth clear to us is precisely that this dissatisfaction is a part of being alive. In other words, what Freud called “common unhappiness” might also be termed dukkha, or even more familiarly, “the human condition.”

What happens next is that this craving for things to be different— our “common unhappiness”— meets the ignorance that has built up in our minds through our life experience. We’ve taught ourselves lessons, day after day in our lives, about how best to satisfy our common unhappiness. We wrongly come to believe that drink, or drugs, or sex, or video games, or burying ourselves in a novel, will satisfy the dissatisfaction that is an inevitable part of being human.

Why do we pursue these escapist approaches to our unhappiness? Through millions of years of evolution and natural selection, the brain has evolved into a kind of factory with pollutant byproducts. It produces thoughts, emotions, memories, and helps us comprehend what we experience by filtering new information through past experience.

Still, despite all the fantastic functions the factory in our head fulfills, it’s not running on clean fuel. It runs on our ignorance, and belches it back out of smokestacks at the top.

We allow mental factories to run on ignorance, and inevitably produce more ignorance and suffering in the process (hello, kamma!). Instead, the Buddha says, we should be working to reduce these poisonous byproducts through the cultivation of alternative sources of mental energy that are untainted. Among the solutions presented in the dhamma, Buddha suggests we should cultivate compassion, kindness, sympathetic joy, equanimity. These are known as the brahma viharas, or the sublime abidings, and we practice them every week in meditation at the Lamont Street Collective in DC.

By moving away from craving or desire as fuel for our actions (we extinguish the fire through deprivation of fuel, or “nibbana” it), we learn how — to the extent possible — to live in the world on the less harmful, more subjectively pleasant, and endlessly sustainable energy of kindness. Through the law of kamma, “burning” kindness as fuel will begin to clear the dirty air in our minds until it is as clear as a spring day. Even if we are never completely freed of the dirty fuels of delusion & their effects, making the effort to switch to the endlessly renewable energy source of kindness will lead to much easier breathing in our mental worlds — and in so doing, we might even begin to breathe easier in the real world.