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When joy is much stronger than pain, the joy can displace the pain, but when the pain is so strong it cannot be displaced, then the joy can exist alongside the pain without displacing it or dissolving it away.
when pain is overwhelming, joy does not dissolve away the pain. Instead, it becomes a skillful container for the pain, limiting its damage and allowing the healing process to work. It is a little like putting a cast around your leg when you have a serious fracture. It prevents further damage and allows the leg to heal over time.
never be afraid to experience joy in the midst of great pain.
Complementing the willingness to experience joy in the midst of emotional pain is the willingness to experience the emotional pain itself.
Difficult emotions always involve unpleasant sensations in the body.
The willingness to experience emotional pain is, in large part, the willingness to experience great unpleasantness in the body.
There are four steps to working with painful emotions in the body. The first is to clearly perceive that these emotions are just unpleasant sensations in the body.
The second step is to recognize the central role played by aversion.
The most important insight here is that aversion is the proximate cause of suffering. Therefore, to reduce or eliminate suffering, the point of attack is aversion: the more this aversion can be reduced, the less suffering one experiences, despite the sensation and perception of emotional pain. In other words, the feeling (sensation and perception) is the same, but the feeling about the feeling is different. The third step is to apply the first antidote to aversion: loving-kindness. By seeing the painful emotion clearly for what it is (bodily sensations) and then applying loving-kindness both
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If it is too hard to bring up loving-kindness toward yourself or your situation, try doing it for somebody for whom it is easy for you to have unconditional love, because that feeling alone will go some way in soothing emotional pain. The fourth and final step to working with painful emotions in the body is to apply the second antidote to aversion: equanimity.
Every now and then, I remind myself, these emotions that I feel, they are simply sensations in my body—these emotions are not me. In addition, those thoughts that come alongside these bodily sensations, they are simply thoughts—these thoughts are also not me.
I allow all these feelings and all these thoughts to occupy my body and mind. I allow them to stay as long as they want, cause as much pain as they want. All I do is watch them with equanimity.
I soon realized, when I let my mind identify with these emotions, I was not present for my wife. However, when I simply witnessed them as clouds in the sky of my mind, I found a deeper reality behind them. Compassion. When I let go of my fear, my thoughts of “God, why all this? Why all at once?” I found I could love my wife with a level of depth and empathy she had not experienced before.
The cognitive step in working with emotional pain involves rethinking the situation that brought about the emotional pain. It is about taking the skillful perspective, seeing the big picture without our objectivity being clouded by afflictive emotions. It very often involves reframing or reinterpreting the meaning of the situation with two things: objectivity and compassion.
We often judge others by jumping to conclusions about their intentions based on the effects their actions have on us, which often are more negative than their actual intentions.
the way we judge ourselves tends to be far more negative than the facts can justify.
our seriously flawed perception of reality leads us to be far less happy than our life circumstances justify because we tend to downplay the positives and overplay the negatives in our lives.
Only when you can clearly see how you fail will you be able to overcome the causes of those failures.
When you are growing, it often feels like you are failing all the time, but I encourage you to look back at your journey every now and then to see how far you have come.
three steps in suffering skillfully:
Don’t think, just feel. As much as possible, just feel the present-moment sensations in the body.
Similarly, treat the self in pain like a baby and cradle it tenderly with love.
understand the suffering, and allow that understanding to turn into compassion.
Love yourself enough to allow yourself the space to suffer, without shame or judgment.
Love yourself enough to allow the space and time to heal. Love yourself enough to cradle yourself in pain, tenderly with kindness. And love all sentient beings enough to want to cultivate compassion.
By firmly establishing stability, the meditator puts the mind on track in a meditative state where it is alert, relaxed, and stable, and then he withdraws all mental effort, allowing the meditation to happen by itself.
The meditator only reapplies effort when attentional stability wanes (and withdraws effort again soon after).
In meditation, effortlessness must be established on the foundation of attentional stability; otherwise it is really just mind wandering and a waste of your time.
while the effortful stage is important, its main role is to enable effortlessness.
when I let go of the need to constantly be stimulated by some sensory pleasure, I experienced the joy of ease. I developed the ability to be joyful simply by sitting down and relaxing.
In every case, there are two parts: the immense effort to develop the prerequisite abilities for letting go, and the letting go itself. There has to be both effort and letting go.
Don’t Stop and Don’t Strain.
