At first glance this seem like an impossibility, how could you run away from yourself? However, it's something we've all learned to do, we pick up the habit in our youthful innocence without really understanding where it will lead. We run from ourselves to try to escape from our unhappiness, we seek out distractions from the ways we feel. It seems to work very well in the short run, but it's a subtle poison. It numbs our pain, but it numbs our joy as well.
Of course you don't want to feel pain, nothing wrong with that, and I'm certainly not encouraging masochism here. It's just that many of the ways we've learned to deal with our suffering actually help to perpetuate it, here's a very common example:
Someone says something that offends you, and I'm sure this happens daily to most people. Now you take on this emotion and it doesn't feel good, so you seek to distract yourself from this feeling. In our modern society we have countless options for this. You could go eat a pint of ice cream to distract from the offense you feel, and then go watch television to distract yourself from the queasiness and guilt you feel over eating a pint of ice cream! So easy it is to compound more unhappiness through avoidance of unhappiness...
Here's another common way of “dealing” with offense: blame the other person. This is where anger and hatred come in, they're incredibly powerful tools for distraction. When you're hating someone or something, your attention is no longer on yourself, your focus is on the other. If you were focused upon yourself, you'd notice how miserable you're making yourself feel by holding onto hate, but that's not the point of hate. Hatred is about blaming someone else for the way you feel, it's about focusing upon the other and distracting you from yourself. You feed into your own unconsciousness to numb the pain of offense, while you put all responsibility on someone else!
So how to deal with emotional pain in a healthy matter? It's incredibly simple, but at the same time it's incredibly difficult for people to do because of strong habits that have built up. If someone placed a red hot coal in your hand, what would you do? Would you hold onto it and search online for techniques on dropping hot coals? Maybe go to your local bookstore and find a book on how to let go of a hot coal? Attend a week-long retreat held by an expert on dropping hot coals? Of course not, you just drop it, and it's that simple for emotions too, except that you've never really been taught how to use your own mind.
When someone offends you, you start fighting against the thought. If you really understand how thoughts work, you can see the problem with this. Fighting against a thought doesn't get rid of it, the more you focus upon a thought, the stronger it gets! Yet another way of “dealing” with negative emotions that only makes the problem worse.
Even if you can't effortlessly drop a thought, you've been given a wonderful technique to assist you. It's something very beautiful and healing, called forgiveness. If someone offends you, simply tell yourself this:
“This person offended me, but I'm not going to let it destroy my peace. I understand that what they said reflects more upon them than it does upon me, they are going through their own struggles, and I forgive them for it.”
Amazing how fast something can be let go of when you've rationalized the letting go. Ultimately though, all you're really doing is giving yourself permission to let go of something and when you're truly living Consciously, you don't even need permission.
Humanity's problem, and there's really only one problem, is that we live unconsciously. We spend all day long avoiding how we really feel and we attempt the impossible, to escape from ourselves. This is the root of all addiction, addiction is an attempt to escape from suffering. It's not just “illegal drugs”, we're addicted to the future, to the past, to food, to work, to movies, to video games, to Facebook, to the internet, and countless other things. Really there's only one addiction: distraction. Anything that distracts from the Here and Now, that's what addiction is and it's all self-destructive. Nothing wrong with something like watching a movie, but be honest with yourself about your motivations. Is it being done to avoid something you're feeling?
Nobody wants to live a mediocre life, nobody wants to be numb. People want to truly live, they want passion and meaning in their lives. For this you must accept everything you feel. Every sight, every smell, every feeling, every emotion, all of it. This is your life! Don't try to escape the ugly parts, because you will sacrifice the beauty as well. See the foolishness of trying to run from yourself, it never really works anyway. Instead, keep moving back towards your Center. I guarantee you will discover something priceless.
The Galactic Free Press
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