It’s a little complicated, but my current model is something like “learning to Look at suffering is going to make a visible change in your behavior, but the gains from some of the later-stage steps aren’t necessarily as large as you’d expect from what a naive suggestion of ‘overcoming suffering’ might imply”.
But to use your example of long-term relationships, I’ve definitely noticed improvements in my ability to e.g. just be okay with things that cause tension with my relationships with other people, in a way that lets me accept those tensions rather than react with an unhealthy need to “fix” the other person. (Because obviously if something about my relationship with someone else doesn’t work the way I’d like, it’s the other person that needs fixing… or at least, so some parts of my mind seem to think. But they’ve been a lot less vocal about this recently.)
It’s a little complicated, but my current model is something like “learning to Look at suffering is going to make a visible change in your behavior, but the gains from some of the later-stage steps aren’t necessarily as large as you’d expect from what a naive suggestion of ‘overcoming suffering’ might imply”.
But to use your example of long-term relationships, I’ve definitely noticed improvements in my ability to e.g. just be okay with things that cause tension with my relationships with other people, in a way that lets me accept those tensions rather than react with an unhealthy need to “fix” the other person. (Because obviously if something about my relationship with someone else doesn’t work the way I’d like, it’s the other person that needs fixing… or at least, so some parts of my mind seem to think. But they’ve been a lot less vocal about this recently.)