(This is Part 10 of a series. Go back to Part 9.)
We all have feelings of anger, despair, conflict, anxiety, heartbreak and so on from time to time. We wouldn't be human if we didn''t. They seem so debilatating. Why can't we just get rid of them, or at least improve them?
That's the rub, right there. Because it's not those things themselves that create our suffering, but our resistance to them—our frantic attempt to get rid of them, make them go away, change, get better.
But that very desire to make them change or go away is
a prescription for suffering.
Conversely, when we can appreciate them without buying in—just appreciating them as yet another aspect of the Totality—something about them transforms, or more accurately, something about our relationship with them transforms, even though nothing changes and even though we're no longer wishing for anything to change.
Yes, hopeless paradox. It's almost as if in that silence and peace where the struggle ceases, something new can be born—something that was always there and yet is as fresh as the lark in the morning.
Anyway, my suggestion in that area was to cease fighting with those feelings and thoughts. Loving everything as it is isn't just about the external world, important as that is. It's also about having compassion for our own minds, having compassion for the stream of feelings and thoughts that find themselves wandering through.
To use a metaphor that hints at the truth, every entity in this universe wants to be loved and appreciated. That includes the various focal points in our own minds, the various "top hits" that our minds tend to focus on.
As discussed elsewhere, we don't need to buy in to them, we don't need to identify with them—we simply cease mentally pushing them away, condemning them, wishing they would change and all that.
Perhaps for the first time, we welcome them instead. We're friendly, we just let them be. They have a place too, otherwise they wouldn't be here.
In this connection I suggested working with the phrase
I love you, _____ (his first name). The idea was to use it almost like a mantra, letting it sink in over and over.
Interestingly, it has two meanings: The first is the love that we have for all of our "parts". This includes all those thoughts and feelings and desires and so forth pressing through our minds. Without identifying, we extend our love and compassion to each of them, all of them.
The second meaning is that God, the One, etc. loves us. Obviously it loves us or we wouldn't be here.
Now of course the two meanings are ultimately the same. Because the One is us, because we are the very means by which Existence awakens to and appreciates itself, to say that God loves us is, in the end, the same thing as saying that "we" love our "parts".
Then, from this point of non-resistance, from this point of surrender, from this relaxation, we're much more free to create whatever it is we'd like to create—without holding on to the outcome. That is, we do the very best we can to create whatever our vision or passion is, but we leave the outcome to existence itself.
Naturally, since we are existence and since at the deepest level we don't actually exist as this separate "chooser" anyway, I'm involved in hopeless contradictions here. Nevertheless, the heart will understand and always has.
If we want to lose weight the first step, oddly enough, is to fall in love with our body as it is. In that love affair, in that non-resistance to our own perfection, our vision improves; we're free to see where the body "wants" to go next, if anywhere—without having to dwell in the tension of self-rejection.
If we want to "improve" the world we'd better fall in love with it first. Because condemnation and rejection don't usually improve anything; they only increase polarization and separation. From a place of love and internal peace we have more clarity to see the way forward.
Instead of fighting darkness, let's find a way to turn on a light in the situation somehow—a light so luminous and appealing that it brings warring parties together into a greater goal, a greater vision.
(This is the end of Part 10. Go to Part 11.)
—jim sloman, 7.30.05
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