Much of our pain is due to the fact that we put suffering in the wrong context. We add a mental tax that we don’t need to pay.
Because it’s happening in our bodies, not our heads. This is the misunderstanding that adds to our misery:
“I am suffering my experience, when really, I am just experiencing suffering”.
They are not the same thing. So the suffering is going through you, you aren’t being dragged through the suffering by your bootlaces. If we take that physical discomfort into the body where it belongs, we alleviate much of the suffering.
Because it’s there to be felt, not thought. If I take my suffering into my head, I unload a truckload of stories onto a feeling; it shouldn’t be like this, I can’t handle this, it’s hot, it's cold, it’s windy, my legs are burning, oh no, I don’t want to be here, it’s too much.
It’s none of that shit, it just is!
But you are using your head to try and find an out. What’s the practise then? Be alone with your suffering. When it hurts, feel it in the body, stay there, allow it, keep surrendering into it, and you’ll find something out that you didn’t know about suffering.
As you allow it, it expands, moves, morphs, changes, and becomes more bearable. Then you find that yes, indeed, I can actually relax as I suffer. What a powerful find that is.
But I can only point, the rest is up to you in your experience.
The avoidance we use in our heads to escape suffering increases its intensity because your body is intelligent, it wants to be listened to. The dialogue in your head is, at its very best, second hand, past tense.
So, while you are lamenting this shit experience you “think” you are having, the race is going up the road without your presence, because you are stuck in what’s already happened. The mind sticks to pain like flies on honey.
.Listen to your senses, feel what you need to feel and remember, it’s going through you, you are not going through it.
Gilesy
