See.
Inquire.
What exactly do you have to say to yourself?
What causes you pain?
What belief causes you grief?
What exactly are you saying to yourself innocently, unknowingly, that’s actually causing…
The closing of the heart,
The resistance,
The grief …
And the anger.
Adyashanti, The Omega Institute, July 2007, (CD 10:3)
And what I usually find is that part of me actually enjoys the misery and doesn’t want to let it go.
Which brings to mind the earlier comment spirituality isn’t about finding relief,
but rather, discovering the truth. (see part 1)
It’s embarrassing to find I’m deliberately holding onto pain.
At such times I have to make the choice: Truth or some secret self indulgence.
The choice is up to me.
How wonderful to be brought to this dilemma!
Most people haven’t even noticed what they’re doing.
And they suffer and complain for years.
The Universe is patient.
Here, Adya is in dialog with a student, a man in his fifties I would guess, still carrying the pain from his childhood and his relationship with his abusive father.
Adya asked the fellow what his belief was about that relationship, but feel free to substitute a belief of your own.
Student: “How could you hurt me? All I did was love you.”
Adya: Core beliefs are often where the first innocent misunderstandings happen.
Turn it around a little.
Ask, “How did I hurt me?”
How did you take what happened – cause it happened …
how did your system, that innocent system take an experience that happened
and then, hurt it self?
From that instant on, how have you been hurting yourself?
Student: By holding on?
Adya: And what’s the thought that causes the holding on…?
Student: Fear of being hurt, I think…
Adya: Yes, fear of being hurt.
And this is the crucial point we all must realize –
The hurt is the hurt that we are doing to ourselves.
That’s the hurt.
That’s what we need to see.
How am I hurting myself?
Someone may have hurt me 50 years ago, or I can drop something on my foot (that’s a totally different kind of hurt)… but, from the instant that hurt happened,
from the instant that event happened,
from a few moments after that event,
ALL the other hurt has been something we’ve been doing to ourselves.
That event was long over and so we look back and we go,
“Oh! Someone hurt me and it’s causing me to hurt me now.”
…The thing that’s actually empowering is to see that from the moment something happened, from that moment on, my belief structure shifted in such a way that it’s causing me emotional pain.
If it lay in someone else’s hands, or some other event, you’d be in trouble…
because none of us can ever go back and change anything that happened.
We can’t change anybody or any event…
But, we can see that our current emotional pain is something that our minds are creating and our body is reflecting.
When you get that principle you can go into yourself – meditative inquiry – not like sitting around analyzing it, but meditatively really go in where the thought is always linked with feeling,
so that you feel everything you think…
You have to have the patience to feel what you believe…
so you see, “Ah, that belief causes this pain.”…
“Is that belief a true belief?” …
“If that belief only causes pain, why would I hold on to it?”
When your body gets it on a cellular level that the beliefs we hold are actually the most dangerous things we have in our system –
Then they let go of themselves…
As long as we think someone else is causing the pain, or an event that happened in the past… we are totally disempowered. There is absolutely nothing we can do…
The best that can happen is what I call re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The best you can hope to do is manage your suffering:
Blame somebody less.
Hate them a little less.
Love them a little more.
Personally, I want more than that.
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5 comments:
"As long as we think someone else is causing the pain, or an event that happened in the past… we are totally disempowered. There is absolutely nothing we can do…" I'm working on this one personally on deeper levels. It can be difficult to disentangle associations of the past with events of now. And very humbling too. Thanks for this...
I tried to keep this entry simple - because the empowering part is so important. But this is "cellular healing" and to me that's both huge and subtle.
When we're trying to heal it's so easy to focus on either body, mind, or spirit and tricky to find a balance in all 3, while also going for the easiest entry point and greatest leverage for progress... so I'll just keep blogging...
Thanks for writing.
You hit it here in your comment. It is both huge and simple as you put it. It's really quite a process and the difficulty I have is in articulating these layers. I love how easily you do that right here in your comment. I look forward to more posts.
Thank you for this Pat. Have been mulling over it for quite a while and it seems to me a bit like debugging a computer program. We have to debug and rewire our thinking. They are loops aren't they? You have a flash of a thought and before you know it you are experiencing pain! Because of all the associations with that thought - i've been trying very hard to spot that thought and quickly step aside and observe it and it gets lost with nowhere to go and pronto - no pain! But only to come back again - lol! But hey i have lifetime and more to practise...!
Thanks!
Anjali/Pincushion
What a marvelous analogy! Thanks for sharing it. I have been distracted by & to other things of late.
I've one more post in this series to do... just need to do it. Knowing someone is reading and pondering will help me focus.
Thanks to you and Ruth.
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