Sorry to hear you have suffered, happy to hear you've found peace with how life has treated you. I wouldn't say I'm a deeply spiritual person in any way, but I've seen many people around me find solace in spirituality when going through hardships. What did your path to spirituality or religion or however you'd like to call it look like? How do you look at the world now, or how would you describe what you practice?
Perhaps the most important event of my life was discovering I have autism at age 33. Many things that didn't make sense suddenly did. I pointed my hyperfocus inward to my own mind, at first because I had lost the ability to code and make a living, and wanted to heal my "coding injuries" as I had called them. I had become an atheist at age 20 and primarily had used psychology to try and figure out what was happening.
I studied Buddhism under a mentor and realized that many of the principles applied regardless of your beliefs about cosmology. The idea that all problems humans face can be summarized as "greed, ignorance, and aversion" was a useful frame. These helped me triangulate the ultimate source of my burnout to unmet family expectations that I had for many years tried to live up to but could not. Confronting my family about these expectations and taking responsibility for my own life was absolutely key in my healing.
These days I don't exactly have a set practice but I still live with my mentors. They started a syncretic monastery that welcomes all traditions, and observing the similarities and differences between worldviews has been quite eye opening. The most valuable practice I take from all this is a honed awareness of the root causes of suffering, and I've found that once the root cause is identified, it becomes possible to release it.
This is insightful, thank you for sharing your personal life so openly. How does one go about starting to study Buddhism? I feel like it's a recurring topic that I stumble upon every now and then, but beyond reading up about it myself, it feels a bit impenetrable. I'm already familiar with the general core ideas and such, but applying them seems well out of reach.
Seconding Daniel Ingram, my mentor says that Daniel Ingram's book "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha" is a great introduction for a developer-minded person. I haven't actually read it so I can't comment on it, but I learned from someone who gained a lot about Buddhism from that book. Also happy to chat further over email.
