We all experience feelings that we don’t know how to deal with: discomfort, restlessness, frustrations, anger, worries, fear.
And the first way of dealing with them is by saying they’re not there.
We choose to go on with our lives because it feels easy and it brings instant fulfillment: it is an immediate way to feel better because we can escape the discomfort that we’re experiencing. And while this may look like a fulfilling path – to keep “being happy” all the time – you’re often not getting to understand yourself and heal.
Over the years, I came to see our life on Earth differently. In the end, we are souls in a body having a human experience. And in this experience, we have to deal with so many difficult experiences. But in many different religions (and with the shamans, who I trained with), there is something called the Path of Enlightenment.
And this path brings you to an awareness where you are so liberated that you know how to truly see and experience those uncomfortable feelings. Through that, they simply disappear.
And you are liberated, not because you aren’t experiencing emotions anymore, but simply because you experience them fully, they pass, and you return to a new base state that you’ve developed: pure, enlightened, simple love.
You don’t “arrive” to this point or search for it. In essence, you’re already there, you just have to peel the onion.
Peeling the onion simply means that every time you experience discomfort, you choose to experience it instead of escaping it.
You don’t watch Netflix, go to work, masturbate, go out – none of that. You simply close your eyes and experience it.
This is one of the greatest skills to develop: the self-leadership to be with whatever is.
To sit up tall and be with yourself. To own whatever it is that you’re experiencing instead of projecting it on others.
This is the opposite of escaping – the opposite of what most people naturally do if we don’t train ourselves to be present.
1 What have you been escaping?
2 The next time you experience this, will you sit down, close your eyes, and fully experience it? To give it your breath, to make the decision, to give it new perspective, to let it go? Always start through owning what you feel.