Pain and sadness to do not disappear when we avoid them.  No one enjoys feeling sad or lonely, but it’s part of being human.  Feelings and thoughts are ephemeral.  It is when we cling to them or run away from them that they persist.  When we feel good, we want it to last forever.  When we feel bad, we just want it to disappear. 

I find that when I talk with my patients about an anguish that they are experiencing that the sole act of giving space or allowing for the feeling to be there versus wishing it away, provides relief and inevitably detracts from the intensity of the feeling.  It’s not magic.  It doesn’t mean that the sadness just disappears completely, but it helps.  It’s normal to feel pain and sadness just as it is to feel happiness and joy, but everything is temporary.  Acknowledging this can bring about its own mixed feelings. You are not your feelings just as you are not your mind or your body.  Your feelings and thoughts and your mind and your body are constantly changing.  The only thing that stays the same is the entity that observes the changes, the entity that can identify how the body changes between time x and y.  This observing entity, which some refer to as the soul, exists outside of time and is not subjected to the same principles as the mind and the body. 

Exercise: Try sitting in a quiet place and closing your eyes and concentrating on your breath.  Notice the sensations as you breathe in, how your belly rises or your chest expands.  Observe how it feels as you exhale.  Different thoughts and feelings will inevitably keep appearing in your mind as you breathe.  Notice them.  If you start to feel sadness, identify the feeling inside your mind as sadness and gently return to your breath.  Whenever your mind begins to wander, acknowledge where it goes and bring it back to the breath.  Try this for 5 minutes and you can see how active the mind is and how difficult it can be to simply stay with the breath without intruding thoughts and feelings.  You can also get a sense for the act of observing that I referred to earlier as well as the act of letting go. 

Thoughts and feelings are like waves that are not meant to be dammed up.  Meditating for a short time each day is a very helpful way to practice the art of observing and letting go.

By David B. Younger, Ph.D

This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 5:50 pm and is filed under Suffering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.