Here’s something to ask yourself every time you feel frustrated, impatient, angry, irritated, or sad. Are you participating in the deliberate manufacture of misery?
I know that sometimes it seems like life just deals you a bum hand — you get back to your car and find that you have a parking ticket under the windshield wiper, your boss seems unhappy all the time and insists on micromanaging your project, your clients act like they own you and expect you to drop anything (including any weekend plans you happen to have) to respond to their requests or do yet another piece of analysis, you hear from your doctor that the intestinal problems you have been having are the result of stomach cancer. Life happens. You can do your best to influence the course of your life in a particular direction by the decisions you make and the actions you take, but then there’s the stuff that happens anyhow. Despite all your effort and your best intentions. Sometimes, pain happens.
Buddhist teachers often say that pain happens, but suffering is optional. And it’s true. So, what causes suffering?
- Having expectations (a personal blueprint) that are different from reality.
- Wanting things to be different from the way they are.
- Arguing with what is.
Anytime you want things to be different from the way they are, you will suffer (e.g. be disappointed, feel sad, get upset, feel disease).
When you rail against reality you create your own suffering. That’s right. You are the one creating your suffering. You are the one manufacturing your misery. The sooner you acknowledge and accept this, the sooner you can be in a place of choice. The truth is, you CAN choose how to react to what life presents. You can choose to be angry or sad, or you can choose to embrace what has happened and decide what to do based on what life has presented. If you choose to be upset about what is, the person you hurt the most is yourself.
Have you ever noticed what happens in your body when you are upset about something? Maybe you feel tension in your neck and shoulders, maybe a knot in your gut. Some people feel nauseated or find their cheeks flush. These are all signs that your body is going into fight or flight mode. Your cortisol and your blood pressure are rising. Your body alarms have been set off.
So, tell me this: if you have a choice, why would you choose to do that to yourself?
Any time I see the signals that my body is moving into fight or flight mode, I ask myself weather I want to participate in the deliberate manufacture of misery. The truth is that I don’t want to participate in misery. I don’t want to make anyone else miserable, and I certainly don’t want to make myself miserable. So instead of allowing myself to continue down that path, I short circuit it all. How?
- Take a deep breath — Just take a moment to breathe. When we are upset, our breath gets shallow. Take a full breath in, letting your belly expand. Hold it for a few seconds, then slowly let the full breath out. Repeat this a few times. You’re already feeling better, aren’t you?
- Shift your focus — What we focus on (and the meaning we attribute to it) shapes our emotions. You can distract yourself by whatever was the catalyst for your dis-ease by shifting your focus to something else. Take a walk, look at the trees or the birds or the people walking down the street. Pour yourself a cup of tea. Check your email. Do anything unrelated to whatever you felt upset about — preferably something that brings you joy or puts a smile on your face or makes you feel at peace.
- Ask yourself what you need — When we move away from looking at the world outside, and choose to look within ourselves, we can begin to assess what we need and how we can give it to ourself without looking to someone or something outside ourself to provide it. The great thing about this is that the more often we check in with ourself, the more in tune we become with our inner world (and our inner world creates our experience of the outer world).
Ultimately, it all comes back to self love. Can you love yourself enough to want yourself to live a life filled with love and curiosity and abundance and delight rather than a life full of frustration and stress? It all starts with you, and there is no time like the present to begin.
