Lesson 2: You don’t always control suffering, but you always control your response to it.

Self-awareness helps a lot when dealing with suffering, because it allows you to see what you control and what you cannot influence. A lot of pain is inflicted upon us externally, for example through unlucky events, natural disasters, sicknesses, or bad things that happen to people close to us.

While you can’t prevent these darker aspects of life, there is a corresponding element you do control: your reaction to those events.