MINDFULNESS CREATES HAPPINESS - THE TRANSFORMATIVE VALUE OF PAIN
The key to developing peace of mind is to develop the awareness that life is only going within us. It's ALL only perceived within us. Pleasure and pain is experienced within you. Joy and sadness is experienced within you. Lightness and darkness are experienced within you. Every experience is only going on WITHIN YOU.
Something I try to do in counseling others is to simply have them acknowledge their fear and realize it's ALL going on within them. In doing so we can then start to deal with our fears, insecurities, and past traumas to heal ourselves. So, to put an end to this endless chattering in our minds, wreaking havoc on our emotions that are teeming with so many complexions, we look at the irrationality of these thoughts by giving them context and putting them into one of two categories: Love or fear.
For all our complexity, and despite the fact that we give our emotions so many names, we really only have two emotions: LOVE & FEAR.
Anything other than LOVE is rooted in FEAR. All emotional suffering is fear. Anger, indignation, depression, loneliness, anxiety, and sadness, all come from unresolved hurt and the subsequent fear that developed within us as a result, that we are afraid to re-experience again.
What is anger? Anger is a complicated emotion, because, unlike other emotions, it's very acute in nature and has so many different triggers. If you look underneath anger, you'll always find unresolved pain and fear. Anger can arise for a number of reasons, but, at its core, it emerges from fear. Anger can arise when something is threatening our physical or emotional sense of security, something that exposes our inefficiencies. Easily offended or provoked, we fear what others think of us or fear others will come to see who we really are behind the thin veneer of our persona (ego). Anger can be the fear of having to suffer the untoward consequences of choices that we've made, and as a result, we fear we will be penalized or will have something taken from us. Anger can be the fear that something adverse is going to happen to us or prevent us from getting what we want or the fear that something may be taken from us, meaning our expectations will go unmet. Fear that someone else's decision or choices may create unwanted consequences for me.
What is depression? The fear our life is never going to be any better than our current state of affairs. And sadness? Sadness is the fear that the gaping hole left by something or someone we've grown attached to, in being lost, will leave us with the inability to ever recover because it or they cannot be replaced. Loneliness? Loneliness can be debilitating. It's the fear that we're always going to be alone or the belief that no one thinks we're worthwhile or relevant enough to spend time with. Anxiety? Fear of the unknown. It’s all FEAR!
This is important because a large number of our fears come from a very negative internal dialogue we're having within ourselves that stems from an incapacity to love and accept ourselves. As a result, we create self-deprecating and often frightening stories that only validate and reinforce our fears and the negative beliefs we hold about ourselves. The key to reducing stress and healing the wounds from our past involves creating a "gap" between our thoughts and our feelings by becoming the observer of our thoughts and reframing them. By seeing the thoughts as separate from us and really having no power over us other than the credence we give them.
So, rising above the compulsive and capricious nature of our damaging thoughts involves developing our awareness, becoming "mindful," present, and by paying attention to the meandering of the mind and the messages we're sending to ourselves. Are we loving and honoring ourselves or are we terrifying ourselves and bullying ourselves with insults that victimize us?
Victimizing ourselves is an easy place to go to because it actually serves us, at least temporarily. When we victimize ourselves, we find it difficult just to breathe, so we give ourselves permission to just feel sorry for ourselves and play small for a bit. Others, understanding our pain, feel compassion for us, and subsequently, don't expect much from us. So, we get to step out of the spotlight and stop participating in the incredible adventure of life to rest and regroup. But as is often the case, we often miss the lesson . . . the fact that EVERYTHING is our teacher.
Though usually met with resistance, pain is our teacher and is always a tremendous opportunity to grow, primarily because we tend not to grow during the joyous periods of our lives. During these times, we are immersed in the dynamic experience of life's unfolding and the joy of just being.
Pain has purpose! Whether physical or psychological in nature, all pain has purpose. When we are in pain, we become laser focused!
Pain is a rather sophisticated biochemical cascade developed by the body, that summons and converges all our energy and conscious awareness around the source of our pain or something that threatens our well-being. Pain is very acute and brings an immediacy to physiological and/or psychological gaps in our awareness by creating a hyper-focused awareness of the aspects of ourselves that we've been neglecting or to areas of the body that have recently experienced physical trauma.
Emotional trauma is no different than physiological pain. Both have chemical pathways/signals to get us to focus on our blindspots and what we’ve been neglecting. Just as emotional pain creates a very acute hyper-focus on how we feel about ourselves, the body physiologically knows how to get our attention.
For example, the majority of our immune system resides in the large intestine, yet poor nutritional choices weaken and degrade it, leading to a silent deterioration until our health visibly collapses. After years of neglect and pushed beyond its ability to maintain homeostasis and a healthy internal state, our compromised bodies know how to draw our attention to what we've been either unaware of or simply ignoring. Diagnosed with any number of conditions, we seek the help of professional practitioners, and very quickly become acutely aware of the need to make better choices by choosing to live more mindfully, paying attention to what we failed to in the past. With millions of years in its design the body knows how to heal itself, but sometimes it needs to gather our attention around what needs to be healed.
Similar to being physically sick, emotional trauma always creates introspection and the tendency to evaluate and reframe our choices. We evaluate the paths we've taken and where they've led us. In appraising the outcomes, we assign value to our choices, the intent and motivation behind those choices, and in turn learn a little bit more about ourselves, and how to better move through this experience called LIFE.
Every living thing owes its existence, its development, its morphology, its anatomy, its physiology, and its survival to the natural process of natural selection and adaptation. Every virus, bacterium, fungi, mold, plant, fish, amphibian, reptile, and mammal's intricate design is the result of adapting to opposing forcing acting upon them and nature's beautiful solution in designing a way to counter and adapt to those pressures. Our emotional development is no exception. Every hardship galvanizes our emotional gains made in our development. This is what we call wisdom.
It's unfortunate, but we live in a society that provides us with so many ways to distract ourselves, so, we don't have to deal with our pain if we don't want to. As a result, many become bitter instead of better; and wounded instead of becoming wiser.
In our society, where life has been reduced down to a competitive money sport, where the individual is programmed out of the individual, and where endless marketing only creates a society of isotypes, our self-image is constantly being chipped away at. We cannot help but reinforce all of our fears and insecurities because society, sadly, only appeals to the egoic mind and keeps us focused on the superficial. With this constant outbound focus, we lose sight of who we are and become oblivious of the journey we're on which becomes only an afterthought and something we rarely contemplate. And what is the journey we are on? The journey of self-discovery! Every experience here is lending itself to the evolution of consciousness, both ours as an individual and the collective consciousness of all that is.
Contrary to our popular societal belief, the point of our journey is not to simply work, shop, die and inherit some form of Eternity, which for most, is the concept of a future event we arrive at after we die.
The paradox is that line of thinking is, if something is eternal, it's infinite, it exists outside the dimension of time; it's indivisible, with no beginning and no end. Time simply doesn't apply in a dimension that's infinite. Something finite (with a beginning and an end) cannot become infinite (with no beginning and no end). It doesn't "become" eternal; it's either eternal or it's not. Though I explain this in far more detail in other writings of mine, our souls, the inner dimension of ourselves, are infinite with no beginning and no end. We are points of conscious awareness in the framework of a body and universe that is in endless transition and transformation.
And that's the point! ‘Eternity’ is not something we inherit; it is inseparable from what we are. We're living eternity in each finite, tiny, moment to moment, experience we're having! Forever is made up of "NOWs!" Eternity is only a series of “NOWs,” conscious experiences strung together to create an endless procession of more “NOWs.”
Realize deeply within the essence of your being that the present moment is all you will ever possess, everything else is simply the meanderings and projections of a restless mind.
We cannot have an experience that lies beyond our awareness because our awareness is what produces the only experiences that can be experienced. We cannot have an experience we're unaware of. Because we cannot experience anything outside of ourselves, every event requires us as an observer in order for it to be experienced. The external world you experience is not something separate from you, it is an extension of you.
Awareness is a process of inclusion, where what is happening outside of us (the physical aspect) is experienced within us (the MIND).
We are both the center and the circumference of every event happening within the sphere of our awareness. External events create internal ripples within our mind that we experience as thoughts and emotions. The two are connected but make no mistake about it, every experience we're having is based on how we think and feel about it, and that is only going on within us as a perceptual experience. So, life is never happening to us, it's only and always going on within us.
Awareness creates ALL our experiences and only exists within the infinitesimally small space between the past and the future, that we call ‘NOW.’
NOW is all there is.
The past exists only as our memory and the future only as our imagination, but both projections of the mind are happening NOW. So do we want to experience LIFE as it is, or live trapped in our head, ruminating on the past or projecting into the future - neither of which is REAL.
When we lose ourselves in thought our awareness moves from the physical senses to the internal projections of the mind. We disappear as does our awareness of what is going on around us. We go largely unconscious as we indulge in the pictures appearing on the screen in the theatre of our mind. The physical realm evaporates away as we become lost in our thoughts. The moment is lost to the meanderings of our mind.
Draw you awareness to this moment, NOW. This IS Eternity - regardless of where the mind wanders or where we choose to focus our attention - in reality, or in our thoughts - it is all only happening NOW! NOW is all there is.
Eternity isn’t something we inherit. It’s all there is. We’re living in eternity - only transitioning in and out of form, from lifetime to lifetime, as we phase in and out of the physical dimension with the avatars we construct. We're here because the physical plane provides duality and opportunities that are simply not available for the process of conscious evolution in the nonphysical where we rest temporarily. In between lifetimes there are no struggles, no challenges, no problems to be solved. Our conscious expansion is halted. The physical plane and the mental obstacle course that it creates allows for the individual and collective consciousness of creation itself to expand forever.
So, let's expand!!!
See Mindful Living Creates Happiness - Spirituality
I would love to hear from you and hear your own personal thoughts on how you practice mindfulness or would like to in the comment section below. Let me know if the content of this article resonates with you, provides perspective, or helps you see things in a different way that empowers you to make different choices or see life and relationships through a different lens. I value your thoughts and feedback and look forward to hearing from you.
Love & Light to You in your continued Journey of Self-Discovery!
David
