What if it is all allowed?

Turning Towards Discomfort

Start with basic biological facts, we are programmed as human beings to turn towards pleasures and to avoid pain, this is adaptive it helps us to stay safe and it's essential to protect us from harm. People who lose the ability to feel physical pain are in great danger of injury. Like physical pain emotional pain is something we turn away from, we do this by instinct. Unpleasant feelings are to be avoided, to be pushed away. Take a moment to think about all the different ways that you find to move away from negative emotions, like boredom is something we often turn away from by distracting ourselves with TV and thinking of that moment of awkwardness when we are in the elevator with strangers, how we instinctively take out our phone to have something to look at during those 30 secs of an elevator ride. There are times when we get sad or loneliness, we distract ourselves by checking social media and shopping for random items online, this instinctive move away from unpleasant feelings often plants the seeds of addiction, we turn away from unpleasant feelings toward alcohol or drugs, for some, use food as the way of squash and upsurging unpleasant feeling.

Rigorous scientific research tells us that pushing emotions away, especially unpleasant emotions leads to more distress both physical and mental. An 85-year Harvard study of happiness, following thousands of lives over many decades, compared the wellbeing of the people who habitually turned away from discomfort, with people who routinely faced toward discomfort, they found that people are routinely face towards life’s difficulties and toward life’s uncomfortable emotions, those people reported being more satisfied with their lives, and they have better memory functions as they grew older. Compare to people who turned away from uncomfortable feelings. Those people were less satisfied and as they grew older their memories declined sooner. Many other studies have found that pushing feelings away takes a toll on our physical health as well as our emotional wellbeing.

From an early, age we develop the ability to regulate our emotions, this capacity has tremendous value and it’s a core aspect of what we think of as emotional intelligence. Even when we don’t share our feelings with others, letting ourselves know about them is something that science tells us is a great benefit, both to our own wellbeing and to the wellbeing of others.

What Does “facing toward a feeling” Actually Involve?

One of the fundamental promises of mindfulness meditation is that we sit still, and watch whatever is arising at this moment, we give our full attention to whatever comes up including anxiety, sadness, anger and pain. here is the exercise we could try, the next time you feel something unpleasant, anxiety sadness physical pain, sit still and watch it closely, give the feelings your full attention, with the attitude of curiosity without judging the feeling at all. What does it actually feel like? Where does it feel in my body? What does my head feel like when this feeling is here? Does the feeling change as I continue to watch it? Notice when you want the feeling to go away because that where the part we turn toward as well. Does pushing the feeling away make it stronger? This kind of careful attention from a place of stillness transforms unpleasant experiences, we watch what looks like an unchanging wall of sadness or knee pain and we see that never stays the same for very long, the feeling changes over time and often disappears without our having to do anything. “Facing everything let go and attain stability, stay with that just as that, stay with this just as this” The ability to be with what’s uncomfortable is a remarkable resource that we can cultivate with practice, we can strengthen our ability to face everything.  The mindfulness teacher John Kabat-Zinn said, “You can’t stop waves, but you can learn how to surf.” We can’t stop life from bringing us challenges, challenges will keep coming as long as we are alive, but what if we have more confidence in our ability to face those challenges, whether the challenges are physical or emotional, this can be a tremendous resource that’s available for us to use and any moment and we can get better and better at cultivating at this capacity.

A Mystery Shift

Things can simply stay absolutely the same, but our relationship with them shifts. The nature of that shift is that when it happened, we kind of ok with how things were. Another shift is: I am aware, I just know I am aware now, I am sitting in the state of awareness and that awareness is somewhat at peace with itself. And therefore, we can be at peace. For example, with the condition of the stress, present in the body, the beautiful thing about shift is allowing whatever is going on, its actually in a sense of unconditional, it’s a shift that doesn’t only happen because however we get rid of our stress, rather we let the stress be present, but it's not bothered by it. How do we make that shift more available to more people? It’s an extremely helpful thing that we humans are premade with, we all come with access to whatever that spacious awareness is, that happens in the shift. We all have it. The big question on that is: how we can make that more available?

Allowing …...

Allowing is the one step towards switching that on, we could practice that to see things that don’t need to be changed, which is that slightly broader kind of awareness, we just find we have access to it, the key is to allow it. We don’t have to continue to let the stress bother us instead let the suffering be within a broader state of allowing. It’s a very beautiful thing, it’s a different way of thinking about “healing”. We normally think in a physiological model, that healing means the wounded part goes away. But in this kind of shift we are looking at it's not like that, the “wound” if you will, actually can become a helpful, beautiful, wanted thing. Because somehow it might actually help us to find this larger space of awareness that allows.

Practice seeing without trying, accepting without pushing it away, facing towards physical and emotional discomfort rather than turning away from them. Simply allowing and we all get a taste of this shift.