30 Seconds of Courage and Chocolate Cake: The Third Noble Truth

Nicole Carlson
May 23, 2025

My daughter had a goal for herself when she was a child of being courageous. I’m not sure where she first learned about courage, or why she attached to this goal, but from a young age she would often tell me that she wanted to be courageous. What was amazing to me was that her goal to be courageous wasn’t just a general wish, but rather it was something she’d defined in terms of both frequency and duration! Specifically, she had a goal of being courageous for 30 seconds each day.

I’ve thought about my daughter’s goal to be courageous each day a lot over the years, and especially since I’ve been working with the 3rd Noble Truth, which is about the cessation of suffering. The idea of the 3rd Noble Truth is that suffering can end, if we release our own clinging and craving that things be different than how they are. Of course, this isn’t as simple as it sounds! After all, we’ve all had many years to develop the clinging patters of mind. These ways of thinking and reacting are how we cope with pain in our lives—we tell ourselves that we can take away the pain of life by doing, or thinking, something else. Ajahn Sumedo, one of the Thai Forest Refuge teachers of the past century, talked about this pattern of reactivity as ‘becoming’. In his book, The Four Noble Truths, Sumedo said:

“If we’re experiencing boredom, despair, anguish, or sorrow, we tend to seek some other mortal condition that’s arising. As an example, you feel despair and you think, “I want a piece of chocolate cake.’ Off you go! For a moment you can absorb into the sweet, delicious, chocolate flavor of the cake. At that moment, there’s becoming—you’ve actually become the sweet, delicious, chocolate flavor! But you can’t hold on to that very long. You swallow, and what’s left? Then you have to go on to do something else. This is becoming.” (pg. 49)

So how do we step out of this pattern of mind, where we’re constantly distracting ourselves from life by trying to become something pleasurable, like a piece of chocolate cake? This is where the 3rd Noble Truth and my daughter’s goal of being courageous come in. We step out of the ‘becoming’ patterns of being by seeing our fears, and letting them go. Or as Sumedo said,

“In meditation, our aim is to skillfully allow the subconscious to arise into consciousness. All the despair, fears, anguish, suppression and anger is allowed to become conscious. Then, we let go.” (pg. 49)

He talked about this letting go as ‘cessation’. Cessation involves walking through the fire of our pain, standing under it, and letting it go. This is where courage is needed. Because our minds really want to help us avoid pain—any pain—by distracting us with our own version of a chocolate cake. It takes courage to do this, and even more courage to do it again and again and again in our lives. But, as one of my dear teachers Phillip Moffit often says, “It’s your life. Are you going to show up for it? Are you going to let your potential blossom? Start where you are, by not demanding it be different. Let go of your patterns of suffering so you can open to wholesomeness and freedom in this life, just as it is.”