Eckhart Tolle

psychological suffering, because this is what we're talking about.

We're not talking about toothache or anything like that.

We're talking about psychological suffering.

The psychological suffering arises from stories that you tell yourself in your mind about situations, about your life or your life situation.

As a practical exercise to introduce this teaching to people, I sometimes recommend this.

Next time you find yourself in a situation in which suffering arises, and suffering, of course, is a generic term.

It can come in many forms.

On one end of the spectrum, suffering is just feeling irritated or upset about something.

It might be a minor thing, but you feel irritated.

The other end of the spectrum, there's deep despair, deep depression and sadness, or extreme forms of anxiety, panic.

And all that.

So you have the two and in between there's a wide range of different forms of suffering that arise.

And very often they are not recognized as suffering by people.

If you are not conscious of how your mind operates, you don't even know that you are suffering.

You don't even know that there is another way, that there would be another way in which you could experience this particular situation.

So I recommend next time you find you become upset about something or irritated, which is a form of suffering, minor form of suffering, experiment.

I say, let's imagine a situation that these things happen quite often to people.

You're in a lineup.

Let's say it's at the airport.

Airport is a source where often people experience psychological suffering because things don't go the way they expect them to go.