“But the times when we were happy
Were the times we never tried.”
-Jackson Browne
Recently, my wife and I spent 24 continuous hours traveling from Hilton Head Island to Charleston, South Carolina to Charlotte, North Carolina to Los Angeles to Sacramento to Redding in a series of cars, shuttles and planes with a brief, three hour respite of fitful sleep in a dingy motel near LAX. And it was not nearly as bad as I feared it would be because I let it be what it was. I refused to argue with reality. I accepted what I could not change.
During one of the plane trips, there was a couple in a nearby row who were having a moment. I have no idea what they were talking about but I was struck with their facial expressions and body language. They were intensely laughing with the kind of energy you have when you are fully involved and connected with the same thought or image as another person at the same time. They were laughing so hard, you could tell they might cry; their mouths were open and their teeth glistened as they looked at each other intensely, their moist, bright eyes shining as if light was streaming from them. At that moment, the rest of the passengers disappeared. We were gone. They were alone together in the present, connected in this electric, delicious space as each triggered ecstatic joy in the other.
A few minutes later, I glanced over and noticed they were both quiet now and looked rather bored and distracted. They wore serious, almost sad and pensive expressions. They were back on the plane with the rest of us and conscious of the crying baby, the hard seats and the slow crawl of time and were perhaps thinking about some stressful event they had to face in the future. They were no longer connected. No longer present. One stared out the window and the other played with a straw. No longer joyful. No longer laughing. They were lost in their minds and lost in time. How many of us are lost like that? I wondered if they were thinking about the special moment they had just shared and wished they were still having it.
In his book, Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering, Adyashanti suggests it is our sense of a separate self that causes us to suffer. Once our thinking mind asserts itself, we identify with time, separation, difference, otherness, and sometimes loneliness and alienation. When we are living in our minds, we are no longer living in the present. We are not here anymore. We are not now.
In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Steven Hayes explains that early on we teach children to “categorize themselves and their own reactions.” We are trained in the development of a conceptualized self through a series of stories that others tell about us and we learn to tell about ourselves. We are trained to disconnect from our experience as we name and label parts of ourselves and others and interpret the world and tell stories about it. The more rigid these stories become, the less flexible and more distressed we become. We can feel stuck in our roles and identities, and as time passes, we can feel less alive and vital. Our emotions become enemies that we seek in vain to manage and control.
From this place of separation, we can feel afraid, distant, threatened even by that which is not us. What do we do with such fear? How do we reduce the anxiety of being a separate person in the world? For most of us, we will devise various control strategies that give us the illusion that we are now more safe and secure than we were before.
Many of my clients view their perceived lack of control as their main problem. They complain, “I’m not in control of anything!” The implication is clear. They think they should be more in control of “life.” They assume others are more in control of their lives and from observation, they conclude this is correct (it isn’t). We are taught to be in control and yet too often, the more we try, the more out of control we feel. What is really wrong?
Adyashanti and Hayes agree our desire for control is the problem, not the solution. Adyashanti states, “The reality is that we don’t have any control over how reality unfolds and reveals itself.”
I have often said we can’t control (or change) the past, the future or other people. We can’t always control our own thoughts and feelings. Try to not think about purple elephants right now. Or if you are thinking bad thoughts about yourself, how easy is it to suppress them? Or if we are sad or scared or mad, can we make ourselves happy? Does that work? Do we have that kind of control?
Our efforts at control are one of the chief reasons we suffer. Secondly, Adyashanti suggests many of us attempt to manipulate reality to make it different than what it is. There is a demand quality to our posture in the world as we seek to impose our will upon it and make it be something it isn’t.
Adyashanti writes, “We look to everything in life to make us happy, not realizing that happiness is actually at our very core. It’s natural to our being. There’s no way to become happy. We simply need to stop doing the things that make us unhappy.”
That which is not real is like a dream and “the notion that we are separate is not really true; it’s all made up. It’s all conjured up in our mind. It’s one big dream that we have.”
But trust me, we are not alone in this delusion. “The difficulty with this dream is that almost everybody around us is having the same dream. It’s essentially the collective dream of humanity.”
The third way we suffer, according to Adyashanti, is we argue with reality, “what is and what was.” He writes, “Argue with this moment, and you will suffer. There’s no way to argue with this moment and not suffer. That goes for the past as well. Argue with the past, decide what has been shouldn’t have been, and you’ll suffer.”
We either accept what we can’t change or we change what we can’t accept. Otherwise we are stuck resisting what can’t be changed, creating unnecessary tension and struggle in our lives. Some realities are impervious to our arguments against them. Do we have another choice?
Adyashanti states, “We have to somehow find the capacity to really want to know what’s true, in this moment, without trying to control or make demands of it, because it’s the truth that delivers us from suffering. It’s the truth that allows us to shift out of this egoic state of consciousness that we seem so trapped in, into a whole different state of consciousness, which is more open, free and inclusive – and infinitely more creative.”
At any given moment we have a choice. We can argue against, resist or avoid our experience of reality or we can accept, allow and be willing to let this moment be what it is. Hayes writes, “Acceptance as we use the term, refers both to behavioral willingness and psychological acceptance. Willingness is the voluntary and values-based choice to enable or sustain contact with private experiences or the events that will likely occasion them. Psychological acceptance is the adoption of an intentionally open, receptive, flexible, and nonjudgmental posture with respect to moment-to-moment experience.”
Byron Katie, the author of Loving What Is and A Thousand Names for Joy, writes, “The only time you suffer is when you believe a thought that argues with reality. You are the cause of your own suffering – but only all of it. There is no suffering in the world; there’s only an uninvestigated story that leads you to believe it. There is no suffering in the world that’s real.”
Fortunately, each of us is free at any moment to wake up to what is true and real here and now while we merely notice the stories our meddling minds use to control, change, resist or argue with what is, was or will be. Meanwhile, our peace is waiting here. It’s what we get when we give up wanting what we already have.
