The Gift of Difficulty and the Difficulty to Receive It

[peanutspathtotruth]

Our Relationship To Pain

Perceptions, thoughts, and the pleasures of life are equally as real (or unreal) as difficult and painful experiences. They all exist simply as waves of sensation or being, flowing into and out of our field of awareness. But honoring and admitting the immediacy of pain when it is present in our experience is very difficult for most of us, even when we follow a spiritual practice. If we’re honest, we hate feeling pain and so we try everything to avoid it. This creates many twisted problems which we feel as frustration, fear and even more pain. We have never learned, or have simply forgotten, how to properly assimilate these experiences, and so we suffer. A lot. But why is our relationship to difficulty so… difficult? And how can we approach it in a conscious, harmonious way?

It’s simple: A separate self-identity that is based on misperception and misinterpretation of reality does not only create pain, but is also the core confusion that doesn’t see pain for what it really is. It’s not even seeing itself for what it really is – an illusion. How can an illusion have a real relationship with something that it inaccurately perceives? How can there be a real relationship between two seeming things that are believed to be separate but are actually one? This game is rigged right from the beginning and it’s clear that a deep and healthy relationship with pain can’t be approached from a wrong perception and understanding of existence and self-identity. If we don’t even know what we truly are and what reality truly is, how then do we expect ourselves to know how to deal with difficulty?

 

Flavors Of God's Eternal Dance

In a healthy human upbringing, the separate self is properly introduced into the world so it can naturally develop a mature psyche which is then ready for spiritual realization and embodiment. In the spiritual stages of this development, any false identifications can be transcended and integrated into the true Self. Identification is a healthy step of human development. But when reality recognizes that it is experiencing itself as the human, and is not really separate from anything else, this identification can be dropped. 

When we grow up, we first need to learn to be okay with our pain and not to take it to be a signifier of our wrongdoing or of anything being a problem. (Most of us are already stuck in this stage, which tells us a lot about the urgency of raising the maturity and consciousness of humanity as a whole.) Later on, we come to realize that pain and pleasure are essentially not different from each other: they are just reality being itself, experience experiencing itself. They are different flavors of God’s eternal dance, just as everything else is, too. And it is then when we come to see that not seeing this truth had been upholding the illusion of a separate identity – for we had labeled things as different and categorized them into good and bad. This primary illusion, along with everything else, can then be surrendered to pure, infinite Being – to God.

 

How To Receive The Gift Of Difficulty

So the work we have to engage in to realize that all this is not the struggle we had taken it to be, but heaven itself, is twofold: We have to heal and catch up on our ego development and initiate or continue our spiritual development. Descension and Ascension. Shadow Work and Awakening. Both are really the same development, but they mark distinct phases and processes in our spiritual journey. There is a way to deal with difficult experiences that not only corrects our perception of them, but also heals old wounds that have been kept open by misperception and suppression of pain. To take this approach is to realize that difficulty actually is the greatest gift that God is orchestrating for our self-realization. To receive this gift, although it often seems impossible, is very simple and incredibly effective:

“All we need to do is to quit struggling with ourselves and with reality. When it is said that suffering ceases when one is realized or enlightened, what is meant is that the struggling ceases. Enlightenment is not a matter of not feeling pain, but of not fighting it.”

A.H. Almaas, “Facets of Unity”

Practically speaking, whenever pain arises, don’t do anything. Don’t run, don’t fight, don’t interfere, don’t manipulate. Your mind habitually reacts by denying, suppressing, distracting, projecting. Instead of following these reactions, choose to respond: Respond by not responding, by not reacting any further. Just abort all urges to manipulate anything in your experience. Rather, be willing to face the pain exactly as it is. Let yourself simmer, let yourself burn in the presence of the intensity of whatever difficult or pleasurable experience happens to be here.

It certainly takes courage, strength and trust to sit down for an hour or two when what you feel and experience becomes increasingly difficult and painful. Do it and see how magically graceful the pain is. Be curious to see the gift it has to offer. If you truly allow it to be exactly as it is, and when you face it head on, being absorbed into its core, the pain will spontaneously unfold. It might not leave you for a while and that is okay. Stay with it. As Rupert Spira once said, “No experience is unbearable”. You might not have been capable back then when you were a child, but today you are more than capable to feel any emotion, sensation or mood to the fullest. It will not break you. It will only break and burn what is unreal in you. Be willing to let these parts of you go. This is the only way to heal and to digest difficulty. Feel through it, let it transform itself, let it teach you what’s beneath the pain, the fear, the sadness. You will learn more in one hour of facing and allowing your painful experience than in one week of avoiding it. 

Make yourself the gift of only responding to your pain in this manner: As soon as it arises, have compassion. Love your heart and thank the pain for being there. It has much to teach you and there is absolutely nothing wrong about feeling it. And then, feel it. Sit or lie down and really sink into the pain without trying to do anything about it. Just let it be. This is your freedom. This is your healing.