52. Senior dating can hurt as much as teenage dating when you believe your thoughts

Romance and affairs of the heart are often really painful for people. It’s no different when you’re a more mature guy or gal. Senior dating can be just as hurtful as teenage dating, and for the same reasons. I’ve talked about how it’s always our thoughts that cause us to suffer emotionally in life. It’s never an event or a person but always our thoughts or beliefs about that event or person that causes pain.

The way to get out of that suffering is by honestly investigating our thoughts and beliefs so we can see what’s real and stop living by the lies we’ve been telling ourselves. After that kind of investigation people are usually amazed at the relief and lack of stress they suddenly feel about an incident.* They often say, “It can’t be this easy.” It’s not surprising they’d think that because their old, painful way of seeing life has been with them for years, sometimes decades.

We’ve gotten the idea through some forms of psychology and therapy that it also takes years to reverse those long-held beliefs. But it doesn’t work that way, for the same reason it doesn’t take years to light a cave that’s been dark for centuries. The darkness was only an absence of light. When light shines, the darkness that was never a real entity in itself, disappears instantly. A wrongly held belief is merely the absence of the truth.

Let’s say you’ve had a painful belief for years that you’re not attractive to men. You decide to question that to see if it’s true, and you realize it isn’t. You have lots of proof of times when men found you attractive and alluring. Once you see that reality, just by stopping and looking, it’s like shining a light into a dark cave. The erroneous belief that you were not attractive is instantly seen as false. You don’t have to change anything or fix yourself in any way. You just see the truth for the first time. You realize your old belief was just a wrong thought, an illusion. It has no substance. You don’t have to remove an illusion that was never there.

Maybe it’s a little easier to see this if we look at children and their fear of a monster under the bed as they’re getting ready for sleep. You turn on the light, you show them there’s nothing under the bed, and the problem is gone because it was only a thought believed in, nothing more.

Worry is like that. It’s a thought that we believe and it scares us. But when the worry is over and nothing fearful happened we see that the intense suffering we felt was simply an illusion because we thought we could believe our thoughts. Thoughts about ourselves are no more true than a false worry thought. At some point a thought appeared – “I’m not attractive”. Maybe someone told you that, it doesn’t matter. Somehow the thought showed up for you and somehow you latched onto it and believed it. It became true for you. But in reality any belief we have about ourselves is nothing more than thought-energy that appears and disappears like lightning unless we grab onto it and consider it one of the elements of “me”.

Once you’ve seen enough truths you may eventually even see that nothing you believe is true. Life is living itself, and your beliefs and thoughts about it have no bearing on it at all. Then you can settle back, relaxed in the knowing that without an opinion about how life should be, you’re quite happy with what is, just as it is.

* You’ll find a highly effective questioning method described in article #19 in the November 27th archive in the sidebar.

Copyright © 2005 Chuck Custer