This is part seven of a series looking at the role of suffering in the life of the Savior, and how our own suffering brings us closer to Him. Stephanie: Okay. So, I am a “how” person. All of this stuff is great. And then there’s this gigantic disconnect about, “Okay, yeah, it all sounds really good. Now, what are we supposed to do?” I’m not an expert, by any means, but I have recently embarked on a new journey which is full of all kinds of interesting and edifying things. And one of them is that the language of “good mental health” is basically just Scriptural, written in secular terms—so people who are not religious can understand the same concept. There is a universality about God and about connecting to God. And so, if the soul is the body and the spirit, then you want to connect with the spirit, right? Okay. Connecting to the spirit can be accomplished by learning about and practicing mindfulness, okay? So, I’m gonna give you a few things to think about so that as you think about his talk and start reading the Scriptures again from a new paradigm, you have in your mind this idea of mindfulness.  So, at our basic level, human beings are down here to do five things, pretty much consistently. We are down here to: Seek pleasure, Avoid pain,  Increase our social standing, self-esteem (or in the words of social media), “be liked,” okay? We like to be liked, right? and Protect our loved ones, and Think constantly about how to accomplish 1-4, okay?  Does that sound about right? Okay, these five things are pretty much the reason all human beings suffer—okay?—‘cuz we do; we suffer. It is why and how we find ourselves emotionally upset, emotionally dysregulated (these are therapy words; sorry, I got a new job), and there are a million reasons why we do this, okay? These are the basis upon which we do this (I’m not gonna write these down). So, here are a few of the ways we suffer as human beings:  We worry about the future—yeah, all of the time, right?  We regret our past: “Oh gosh, shoot, I shouldn’t have done that! I can’t believe I did that!”  We are angry or we’re sad for any number of reasons. We suffer from guilt and shame because of the things that we do. We enjoy physical pain: hips, knees, joints, gallbladders, kidney stones—you know, whatever. We find ourselves often bored and stressed. We have anxious thoughts, or we’re depressed, or we worry all the time, or  We engage in addictions or other kinds of things that really bring us down.  So, lesson number one: “Being human” is really hard; “being human disconnected from our spirit” is even harder—it makes everything harder. So... Just I’ll get this out here; this is words to live by: Pain is inevitable, okay? You are down here in your human form (dust, flesh)—you are going to be in pain. Any number of these things are gonna cause you pain, just like I said. But suffering is optional, okay? We do not have to make our pains worse by making them our focus. We can let go of some of this. So, the question then is: How do we avoid suffering when we are in pain?  So, the way to do that is to connect to your spirit and set aside our preoccupation with our bodies, okay? That stuff that you took a picture of [on the whiteboard before Stephanie started talking], that’s exactly what I’m talking about: body, spirit, all right? So, we want to separate ourselves from that.