When you end up in a place in your life where you are suffering, you are at a crossroads. And you get to choose one of the two options that I will share with you later.
But first, why do we end up suffering?
Suffering is never something we want to experience but we do it anyway. And we don’t want it not because we set ourselves, in any way, not to have this experience but because we’ve been living an unwanted life.
Imagine this.
You’ve been raised by a very religious family, and you’ve never agreed with your family’s views on life, but you had no choice but to respect them and live your life according to them. You had to go to church every Sunday, have days of fasting, never stay up late, and always say your prayer before going to sleep.
In your mind, this was nonsense.
You never understood how your family believed so much in an imaginary person sitting in the clouds. And to add even more to the hypocrisy, you’ve seen the unjust ways of the church and all the lies, brainwashing, and unethical actions the church has.
The more you live a life you don’t want to have, the more you will suffer.
Simply because our parents lived their lives one way, it doesn’t mean we have to follow. Just respect their views as long as you live under their roof and eat the food they put on the table and, after you move to a different place, you should be free to do whatever you want.
That freedom is what triggers suffering.
Freedom triggers suffering because you don’t know how to handle your new life
All of a sudden, you are on your own, free to believe, do, and feel whatever you want to believe, do, and feel.
While it may give you a big boost of dopamine, after the dopamine is gone, you will be left with a lot of confusion. You won’t know what to do to change your life because you’ve never been in that situation.
“Ok, I’m not going to the church anymore. Now I have the Sunday mornings for myself.”
Right there, in that moment, you become confused.
And the more the thing you want to change is deeply connected to your beliefs, when you’ll try to change it, you’ll experience a new set of feelings that you’ve never experienced before.
That, right there, is your suffering.
To suffer means to experience something so deep emotionally that your body and mind don’t know what to do with it. And not knowing it generates pain.
Anxiety sets in. You become stressed. You try to think, but your prefrontal cortex has lost its functions. You try to find help, but the help you ask for is built on a foundation of uncertainty, which is why you won’t be able to solve it.
When you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know what you’re looking for. Uncertainty will fuel your stress and anxiety even more, to the point that you will become angry with whoever didn’t help you in your past improve your ability to handle new situations. In this case, it may be your parents.
The two options you have when you suffer
The only bad thing about suffering is the pain that it comes with. But suffering is necessary.
Through suffering, we get to explore deeper parts of ourselves that otherwise are left untouched. In fact, that exploration itself is what we call suffering.
Going back to our example, where you live in anxiety and stress, even anger, you are left with two options: you either become resentful or you forgive.
You can become the angriest person you’ve ever met and blame your parents, God, the church, and whoever else was part of the equation, even in the most unrelated way.
This anger will define your life and you’ll identify with it. The thinking, emotions, and beliefs behind your anger will define your actions and you won’t get to experience anything good in your life. It will be a life of vengeance, trying to get back at even the smallest and insignificant act of injustice. You will get mad at people smiling and feeling good about themselves because they live a life different than yours, a better life, and that is… unjust to you.
On the other hand, you can forgive everyone who did something bad to you.
In fact, nobody ever does something bad to you. Worst case scenario, they do something bad to the image they have in their minds about you. But that image has nothing to do with who you really are.
When you forgive people, the best thing that happens to you is that you now have the chance to live in the present. When you don’t think about what should have happened in the past, you are closer to living your life in the present moment, and that is very valuable.
Manifesting the life that you want to have starts from the present moment and it’s the only way. Trust me. I’ve been there.
I’ve been angry at so many people for many reasons. In that moment of my life, nothing worked. Absolutely nothing. And as soon as I let go of that anger and started forgiving people, one by one, my life started changing.
If you’re in a place where you experience a lot of suffering, just forgive whoever you are mad at. It will lower the intensity of the pain you’re experiencing.
With love and optimism,
David
