YOU ARE NOT ALONE
Here are some thoughts that may resonate with you:
“Life is unfair – I try my best but life seems intent on making me suffer.”
“I can’t ever seem to get ahead. Life seems like an eternal dance of one step forward and two steps back.”
“I feel more and more alienated – I feel increasingly lost and disconnected.”
You are not alone!
If most people answered honestly, you may find the vast majority harbour these thoughts. If someone asks you how you are, you know they are not really interested in what may really be going on for you so you may smile and say “fine” when fine is the very last thing that you are.
The stiff upper lip may not be all that it is cracked up to be!
I remember at the first retreat I ever attended, realising pretty quickly that most of us are dealing with the same stuff – not only that I was not alone but that it appeared that suffering was pretty much part of the normal human condition.
For me at least, that came as a big relief.
Life really is not personal – sometimes things appear to be going our way and sometimes they do not. Sometimes we are happy and sometimes we are not.
That is the reality of the human condition and the reality of life.
How can Self-Enquiry help?
Simply to acknowledge that this is how it is, and that you are not alone can be of grwat benefit.
But that should be the beginning, not the end of a search for a more joyful experience of life.
I first came across self-enquiry through the work of a teacher called Byron Katie whose very simple and yet powerful teaching, was to ask, in response to any judgemental thought, “Do I know this thought to be true – 100%?”
If you start to examine your thoughts and are prepared to be rigorously honest with yourself, it may be possible for you to come to see that there is no inherent truth in any thought – especially those where we seek to blame or judge anyone else – or ourselves for that matter.
What would happen if you stopped believing the thought “life is unfair.”
How might your experience of life change in that moment if you stopped believing that thought?
This does not mean replacing the thought “life is unfair” with “life is fair”.
That is equally untrue – it is simply that we have much less of a problem believing the latter.
What is true, is that life is, and what will be will be.
Armed with this simple question, “Do I know this thought to be true?”, you may start to enquire of much that you have always believed and taken for granted.
Questioning our thoughts all by itself can be a gateway to freedom – and the freer you are, the easier it becomes to let go of those judgemental thoughts and to allow what is.
Then you are in flow, you are no longer fighting reality and you may find, without much effort at all, that you are no longer hostage to the inevitable ups and downs of life.
Then you may find you wish to enquire more – and then the fun can really begin.
“The freer I get, the higher I go,
The higher I go, the more I see,
The more I see, the less I know,
The less I know, the more I am free.”
Ram Dass