It is for certain that life has it's ups and downs. Sometimes you are happy, healthy and loved and sometimes you aren't. Sometimes you have a big win - a job promotion or reaching a health goal - and sometimes you don't. Sometimes what you have feels like enough and sometimes it doesn't. Everything changes.
If knowing all this was the answer, you'd be fine. But it's not as simple as that.
That's the thing about wisdom, having the information alone doesn't necessarily make things better. Happiness, resilience and wisdom are less about what you believe intellectually and more about how you implement the belief emotionally and mentally. Sure, wise words may occasionally bring comfort but when you are really hurting it usually doesn't help. Sometimes it translates as "toxic positivity" and makes things worse.
Often people look towards distractions for relief, good or bad, which if only used temporarily, the pain returns. So what then?
We are designed to be resilient but chronic or acute stress can diminish resiliency. The good news is that we can rebuild that strength with a few healthy habits.
The basic skill of meditation cultivates a different relationship to pain, one that can enable it to be much more bearable. It starts on a micro level in your own meditation. You may be bored, sad or uncomfortable but whatever it is, you're able to just sit with it, meaning, allow yourself to feel what you're feeling, perhaps noticing how it feels in your body, without becoming consumed by it or insistent that it goes away. It just is what it is. This is not about gritting your teeth and enduring the difficult stuff, rather it's more or less the opposite. It's about relaxing the jaw and allowing the difficult stuff to flow through without obstruction. It comes and goes, it rises and falls, yet your attention is acting as a witness of the thoughts rather than owning them. The difficult feelings do what they do. You're not drowned by them, you're noticing them, allowing them and accepting them - "observing them as clouds in the sky" as I often say.
This type of acceptance is not the kind of acceptance in the sense of "this is for the best", rather, it means acceptance in the sense of "this is what's happening right now and I can just be with it". With that releasing of the resistance to the difficult feeling, several things happen.
Extra suffering disappears. Some say pain has 2 parts: the pain itself and the part of resisting the pain. The first part is often beyond your control. It's going to hurt and maybe it should hurt. But you could really do without the second part. If you can train yourself to notice when you are perpetuating pain by dwelling or ruminating about it or trying to distract and avoid it, you can stop yourself from all that extra pain.
Without all that resistance feeding the pain, sometimes - not always - the pain itself decreases on it's own. See if you can notice this in your meditation, it may be subtle but real. A pain or burden comes up but if you simply notice it and gently return to observing your breath, it might just pass on its own.
Without the resistance, the mind can relax a bit and the heart can open. Then, some of the wisdom can resonate. Change is inevitable. Ups and downs happen. Being able to show up, be present and observe what's happening allows you to relate to the pain in a wiser, more compassionate way. Taming the mind is a tool we learn in our meditation seat and use it in our daily life.
This tool is what builds resiliency and is very much like exercise. It is work and you must continue doing the work, as it is perishable. So in my experience, as I go through changes, divorce, empty nest, letting go of a lot of how I used to live, meditation helps me to accept the changes, not simply by words of wisdom but actually training the mind how to accept. Practicing this in meditation will translate in times when life takes a turn, when it counts.
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