Undergoing life's situations

What will you see if you strip away everything that you connect with your life externally – your possessions, your friends, family, pets, your life situations – everything?

It is not easy to do; I tried to do this and struggled with it.  I found that my attachment to everything I associate as part of myself is very strong, and the thought of not having any of these things made me afraid that I was nothing, that a part of me was being taken away.  My immediate reaction to this was fear; fear of not having my possession, not having a job, not having a nice home to live in, not having a car, not having money, not having anyone in my life.

But once I got past the fear by acknowledging it and then accepting it, I was able to see myself as being free from all the limitations that our life puts on us.  It is awesome to come face to face with this being – the real you – and believe me it is life changing.

This feeling did not last very long, as I came back to my perceived reality (I say perceived reality because our life as we see it with our mind is not all that is) and back to the everyday worries and happenings in life.  But the experience made me realise that there is more to our life than what we see with our limited mind view.

All of us go through suffering in some way or other in our lives, and when we do, we feel that it is going to overcome us and we feel that we are not going to make it out of the situation and don’t know how we will survive.  And then we hear about someone else who is going through something much worse and think ‘hey what I am going through is not really that bad’.  What this leads me to think is that suffering is relative; it is in the mind of the person undergoing the suffering.  We can either let it consume us and get the better of us, or be aware that it is only a temporary situation to show us how we need to grow and what our next course of action should be.  And if we do the latter, we can then move through the experience and come out of it faster.

It’s easier said than done, because the experience is real to us and we may feel like we are going to lose everything that we have ever known or believed in.  My belief is that only way to move forward is to believe that things will change, it has to, we cannot stay static in any situation forever, and that the change will be for the better, whether we realise it now or not. 

In Love and Light