What are struggling with in your life? Perhaps it is something painful that you want to end or get away from as quickly as possible. A physical pain. An emotional distress. A painful relationship issue. While it may seem easier to escape the pain by running from it or pushing it away, resisting it may only make matters worse. What if you could see the difficulty in your life as an opportunity to ease your suffering instead of intensifying it? Would you be willing to give it a try?
Mindfulness practice encourages us to approach our suffering with an attitude of openness and acceptance. For example, by letting go of our expectation that we should not be having this pain…this particular difficulty in our lives, we release ourselves from the burden of having to makes things different, to change something that might be unchangeable; and this radical “shift” in how we relate to our difficulty may be enough to generate an immediate sense of ease about the situation that we may begin to notice as a relaxing of our muscles, a softening of our emotions, and a slowing down of our thoughts. Gently opening to the pain may allow us to see the situation, and our reactions to it, more clearly and cultivate the discovery of new insights into the difficulty we never imagined. Who knows, we might even discover that it was our particular reactions to the difficulty that was responsible for a large part of our suffering.
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