The First Noble Truth

For the aspiring Buddhist:

What is the Noble Truth of Suffering? Birth is suffering, ageing is suffering, and death is suffering. Disassociation from the loved is suffering, not to get what one wants is suffering: in short the five categories affected by clinging are suffering.

There is this Noble Truth of Suffering: such was the visions, insight, wisdom, knowing and light that arose in me about things not heard before.
This Noble Truth must be penetrated by fully understanding suffering: such was the visions, insight, wisdom, knowing and light that arose in me about things not heard before.
This Noble Truth has been penetrated by full understanding and suffering: such was the vision, insight, wisdom, knowing and light that arose in me about things not heard before.
[Samyutta Nikaya LVI, 11]

The 'First Noble Truth' with its three aspects is: ‘there is suffering, dukkha. Dukkha should be understood. Dukkha has been understood.’
This is a very skillful teaching because it is expressed in a simple formula, which is easy to remember, and it also applies to everything that you can possibly experience or do or think concerning the past, the present, or future.

Suffering, or dukkha, is the common bond we all share. Everybody everywhere suffers.
To let go of suffering, we have to admit it into consciousness. But the admission in Buddhist meditation is not from a position of suffering, because we are not trying to identify with the problem but simply acknowledge that there is one. It is unskillful to think in terms of: 'I am an angry person; I get angry so easily; how do I get rid of it? - That triggers off all the underlying assumptions of a self and it is very hard to get any perspective on that. It becomes very confusing because the sense of my problems or my thoughts takes us very easily to suppression or to make judgments about it and criticizing ourselves, we tend to grasp and identify rather than to observe, witness and understand things as they are. When you are just admitting that there is this feeling of confusion, that there is the greed or anger, then there is an honest reflection on the way it is, and you have taken out all the underlying assumptions - or at least undermined them. So do not grasp these things as personal faults, but keep contemplating these conditions as impermanent, unsatisfactory and non-self. Keep reflecting on them as they are. The tendency is to view life from the sense that these are my problems, and that one is being very honest and forthright in admitting this. Then our life tends to reaffirm that because we keep operating from that wrong assumption. But that very viewpoint is impermanent, unsatisfactory, and non-self.
'There is suffering' is a very clear, precise acknowledgement that at this time, there is some feeling of unhappiness.
[quoted from 'The Four Noble Truths' as translated by Venerable Ajahn Sumedho]