Why Is Everyone Happy But Me? Dealing with Unwanted Feelings
Why do we start working on ourselves? Why do we look up posts on the internet that help us deal with life and ourselves? Why do we go to therapy? Why do we do all these things?
Have you ever thought about it?
As for me, I started looking into self-development when I was going through a very difficult time with anxiety. It’s pretty obvious that I started searching around for help because I wanted to get better. I wanted to feel better, because I was feeling horrible most of the time. My life was not very enjoyable, and I didn’t like it. I wanted to be happy. Or at least happier.
Most people who are peaceful and happy didn’t start out that way. They began improving themselves because they were unhappy and non-peaceful.
So what does that tell us? People want to better themselves because they want to feel better.
That’s not a bad thing, of course. We should learn to enjoy our lives and understand ourselves. It’s the most useful skill to have. But there are holes we can fall into unexpectedly. And that’s what I want to talk about today.
As I said, I started practicing mindfulness when I was having a rough time. Meditation and mindfulness practices helped me immensely. Immensely. They helped me understand how my mind works and how I can practice responding to my own habitual patterns.
But I did make mistakes in the process. One of these mistakes was that I believed that if I practiced long enough, I could eliminate discomfort. That these practices would completely remove my fears. And there were times when meditation was a way for me to avoid unease. Because I wanted to be in that special, peaceful state of mind, always.
I thought that was possible. I thought that’s what I was supposed to be doing. I thought that if I wasn’t peaceful and comfortable all the time, I was doing something wrong. That feeling even a tiny bit uncomfortable was my fault.
I put myself down whenever I was not feeling great. I thought it was the sign of my own failure.
But like I always say, just because you think something does not make it true. And like a lot of my thoughts, these ones ended up being untrue as well.
It’s easy to mistake meditation and mindfulness with feeling good and being at peace. But meditation is not about feeling good at all. Actually, if we think that, we just set ourselves up for failure, because let me tell you: Everyone experiences mental and physical discomfort. Everyone. Even the most experienced meditator or the wisest Zen master.
Meditation is not about fixing ourselves, it’s about learning to relax with ourselves. With understanding and acceptance.
We can never avoid discomfort, no matter how many years we practice. You might look at Zen masters and think they never feel uncomfortable, but that’s not true. They just learned how to relate to discomfort. They don’t expect to feel perfect and comfortable all the time. They know that’s just how human life is and accepted it with peace.
We might feel that peace can only come to us if we push discomfort away or try to fix ourselves. But peace happens when we are able to sit with our discomfort without trying to fix it, and instead of hardening, we let it soften us. Read more>>
(via Why Is Everyone Happy But Me? Dealing with Unwanted Feelings)
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