Anguish
Understand it. Stick with it until anguish (at least sometimes) ends. Don’t stop—cultivate a life of understanding and ending anguish. This is how Gotama, the Buddha, summed up what woke him up.
We come to understand anguish by slowing down and noticing it. When the uncomfortable sensations that we name anguish come, we don’t turn quickly away to something more pleasant. We let it be what it is. We work toward empowering that part of our mind that specializes in observing it. It doesn’t take long to begin to understand much or at least some of what anguish is about.
Once we glimpse what anguish is about, once we begin to see what causes it, we begin to be willing to let go of some of those causes, and (no surprise) we have less of it—which gives us confidence to keep working with understanding anguish and letting go of what causes it.
With this understanding and this experience of more freedom and this growing confidence in our own ability to understand and let go of anguish (in other words to begin to wake up), we very naturally put more and more energy into working the wisdom of this practice into the ground of our lives.
(This is all paraphrased from Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism w/o Beliefs)
