Truth Bomb Tuesday: You won’t believe you’ve been sitting on a cure your entire life…
I’m going to tell you a secret.
This secret will change your life.
You won’t believe that it has the power to change your life because it seems so simple and obvious.
And because it’s so simple and obvious you won’t believe that it is also one of the most difficult practices we have.
Intrigued? I hope so.
The secret is this: you are the cure to your suffering.
What do I mean by that? Well, you can your suffering right now. Every gripe and complaint, you can end it.
How? By giving attention to it.
When you give attention to it – when you create time and space for it – then the sting of suffering goes. Life is still life, but you’re not suffering any more.
But I’m talking about real attention here. I’m talking about taking time to sit with it and hold space for it.
I’m talking about being with what is painful, or worse, uncomfortable.
I’m talking about unflinching and loving attention on what the deepest part of you is calling out for.
I’m not talking about anything less than that.
And I’m definitely not talking about noting it briefly and then running off and developing a whole bunch of strategies to fix it.
Suffering feeds the ego.
That’s a potent sentence, but it needs a bit of unpacking, because we’ve got all confused with “ego” and “vanity”.
When I say suffering feeds the ego, I mean ego as “the problem solving mind”.
This is the part of the mind that has constructed an image of itself, and then uses that image to navigate the world, doing this and executing that.
It’s the problem solving mind. The strategy mind.
And when we suffer, our first instinct is to fire up the problem-solving mind, and come up with this or that strategy to go and fix it.
And there’s nothing wrong with that… if we’re doing it consciously.
But often times, we don’t actually need a strategy.
What we need – what we’re really calling out for – is just some loving attention. It’s enough for our gentle animal body to feel heard. For it to feel like we’re listening and we’ve got its back.
We don’t need strategies. We just need to be heard.
And if we’re honest, how many of our problems can we really solve with strategy? The prospect of inevitable death, the grief of losing loved ones, the despair of dreams and desires unrealised?
If our problem is something like “I feel like a need a coffee.” A strategy is the right response.
But if it’s the overwhelm of being a little fleshy being in a monstrously large universe, strategy ain’t going to help us.
We can spend our whole lives searching for that strategy that’s going to save us from pain and heart break – and just spend our whole lives running.
We can spend our whole lives running when we already have the answer to our suffering. We already ARE the answering to our suffering.
Everything you are trying to get away from – you already have the answer right here. It’s quiet, consistent loving attention.
It’s as simple as that.
And as difficult as that.
DB.