Suffering is inevitable, so why do we run from it so much?
Because it hurts, evidently. Why would you sit with sadness, grief, disappointment, and heartbreak when you know you could distract yourself with work, a bottle of wine, or ill-advised, poorly funded, self-care shopping? Why would you cry when you could numb out while watching Grey’s Anatomy? But after every work sprint, at the bottom of the bottle, when you get bored from your new purchases, or when you realize you’ve binged 18 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy in a week, the emotions you’ve pushed away bubble back to the surface of your awareness. But what if we did allow the stillness to come? What if we let ourselves feel the hurt, pain, and suffering? We would find that emotions are like waves that crash into the shore and soak into the sand or wash away with the current. When we let our feelings out, they’re no longer tugging at our hand, begging for attention. So often, we are more afraid of what we might feel than we are of the actual feelings that await us. Sitting with feelings is scary. It comes with uncertainty and dread. It involves tearing down the protective walls, allowing you to feel emotions without judgment, and eventually accepting them. Raw and painful as they may be, allowing air to breathe and heal. Painful emotions are real. They exist on a scale of intensity and can come from seemingly small losses to life-altering tragedies. What you feel is valid. Our difficulties remind us to pay attention. We feel discomfort. Our authentic experience is mixed with opinions, judgments, and worries concerning how it should be. When we experience that pain without thinking or judging, it begins to fade. It can dissolve if you get your mind out of the way. It takes a lot of daily sitting to keep the courage available. The discipline, bravery, and consistency of sitting with it build our ability to experience our authentic lives. How do you stay with the pain? You stay with it as long as possible, and inevitably, you start to master it. And it’s not a matter of virtue whether you sit with it. It isn’t good or bad. We do our best; that’s all we can ever do. Nothing we do is wasted if we’re aware of it. Nobody likes anguish. But the idea that there’s some other way across the bridge from unreality to reality besides going across it is an illusion. We are good at unreality. We built our whole culture on trying to alter our reality. It hurts—well, buy a new dress. It hurts—take a holiday. It hurts—take a pill. We have dozens and dozens of ways to cover that hurt. And, because we live in a society with so much stuff, those ways are much more available to us than to people in earlier or less affluent communities. If letting your emotions in feels too scary, prepare a list of coping strategies you can use if you feel overwhelmed. First, start a list of anxiety triggers, and ask yourself, “what are the underlying feelings or fears behind each one”? Then, give yourself a quiet hour to deepen your awareness of these and do so non-judgmentally. Finally, work with a therapist on increasing your ability to feel safe in feeling your emotions. All feelings are valid. They may not necessarily be rational - that’s okay. Give yourself grace and let your feelings flow naturally. How about you? How do you sit with your pain? Join the discussion in the community.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI was born in 1986 in Lebanon. I'm still trying to find my passion in life and in the meantime I'm learning to navigate my bipolarity and redefining stability. Archives
February 2024
Categories
All
|