56. Dating “pain” passes more quickly when we stop loading sensations with labels

When you have thoughts that argue with reality you’ll be in pain and you’ll always lose. Reality is just what is. It’s only when we have an opinion that it should be different that we hurt. Our opinionated thoughts bring up sensations that register in our bodies. We call them emotions. They’re sensations in the body that come from our thinking not from some physical source like a cut finger, a pulled muscle or a disease.

Dating, even as seniors when we might think we’ve gone beyond teenage feelings, can still often be painful. We don’t get what we want and we hurt. We’ve been conditioned to think we know how things should be. And when they aren’t that way we suffer. The first thing we can do about that is to examine our thoughts. Are we seeing reality as it is or are we resisting what is?

When we look we see that life doesn’t go according to our opinions and wishes. It never has. It just goes as it goes and the sooner we see that reality the more we’ll enjoy life. Believing it should be our way is living in a fairy tale world. So… the woman you’re interested in doesn’t want to see you again. That’s like your hopes for a sunny day, and it rains instead. Well, that’s just the way it is. There will be other sunny days. There will be other women to be interested in.

Sometimes, though, our emotional pain gets pretty intense and we have trouble dropping the “should” and “ought” thoughts that are causing that pain. That’s when we can notice what label we’ve put on what we’re feeling. What we actually experience in our bodies at any time are simply sensations. But we slap labels on these sensations and as we do we load them down with all our past memories of what that label means. The sensation becomes a lot more painful than it is without the label.

We tell ourselves we’re feeling afraid, anxious, angry or depressed. That’s the label. But what’s the actual sensation in our body? Is the stomach in knots? Does it feel hot? Is there just an empty sensation? Without labels we’re simply being with what is. When we add a label we add all the emotions we remember from the past when we had a similar sensation. We’re then feeding the sensation with a lot of energy and thoughts that aren’t true.

Animals don’t do that. I often have a lot of squirrels in my back yard. It’s a big yard with lots of bushes and trees so neighborhood cats also like it. Sometimes a cat will spot a squirrel and the chase is on. There’s never a real contest because the squirrels are too fast. But obviously the squirrel is also running for his life.

What’s interesting is what happens when the threat is over. The squirrel will sit for half a minute or so with its tail swishing up and down in short bursts and it’s obvious the animal is releasing pent up energy. The squirrel’s nature is to live, so adrenalin pumps as it’s racing for its life. But when that adrenalin is no longer needed the squirrel shakes it out and a minute or so later he’s going about his business as if nothing happened. If that were the average human we’d be fuming and worrying for days. We’d have labels for our sensations and our minds would now have an inflated picture of what we felt and we’d be reliving the experience and the suffering a hundred times.

Next time you feel what you might normally call anxiety or fear or loneliness try just being present with the energy and sensation in your body without labeling it. When you withdraw energy from the label, which is nothing but a thought, the sensation takes its normal course and disappears. You’re like the squirrel, letting the energy take its course and pass through you. Then you’re back to simple inner happiness, just watching this mysterious life unfold and going about your business.

Copyright © 2005 Chuck Custer

55. Between dates are you happy with now or stuck in worried thoughts?

When we’re dating at this later stage in life it’s a different game than it was when we were young. Then, we had our whole lives before us. Life felt like an exciting adventure as we were meeting new people and exploring new relationships. By now, though, we’ve had a lot of life experiences, lots of memories that give us a lot of ideas about how life has been and how we want it to be. Dating as a senior or more mature person is quite different.

With our experience of living we now have a lot to think about. It’s also not uncommon to be more aware that life isn’t going to last forever and we want to get the most from it, and especially we want the right partner to share it with. Every time we meet someone new or go out on a date we’re evaluating, analyzing, interpreting. That’s all in thought, and it seems to have a good purpose: We want to pin down a future we can feel secure in. But as we do all that, we’re really living in the past – a dead past, which is what “past” is. Even thoughts of the future are nothing more than a past projected forward. We’d have no idea what a future could be if we didn’t have a past to refer to.

True living and a sense of inner joy, on the other hand, is just in this moment and it comes through the five senses, not through our thoughts. When most of our awareness is taken up with our thoughts that’s also where most of our energy goes. Energy is what life is made up of. Without energy nothing can live. But energy goes only where it’s directed. It doesn’t care which direction it takes. An electric motor will go forward if you push the switch one way and reversed if you push it the other way.

Since it takes energy for anything to live, the more energy you put into something the more life it has. So as we focus on dating, and thoughts of our past and future, those thoughts become bigger and seemingly more real. You put your energy into erroneous thoughts and beliefs and they just take on more life.

In those times, even though we’re using our senses to navigate through life, our whole life becomes about our thoughts. While we’re dating we can become consumed with thoughts about that process, many of them painful thoughts. We may be thinking it’s hard to meet someone or wondering if the one we met will call again. The thoughts take over, and they’re often not thoughts of ease and peace and happiness. They’re thoughts of worry: Will this guy be the one? She seemed cool last night, is she losing interest? Soon thoughts about your dating can take up most of the energy of your life and leave you feeling drained and unhappy.

Instead of putting so much focus and awareness into thoughts there’s an alternative: Switch the energy. Let your focus be on your senses, what you’re seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and tasting in each moment. Without thought there’s nothing at all wrong with right now. That’s where your real life is being lived. And that’s where the natural joy of life as it is can be experienced. When you find yourself in emotional pain it’s always about what you’re thinking. Take the energy off thinking and just be present. In presence there’s freedom and contentment.

Copyright © 2005 Chuck Custer

54. Three commitments to yourself that can make a dating relationship work

Usually when people talk about making a commitment in a relationship they mean they’re committing to be loyal and faithful to their partner. It sounds good but the divorce courts prove it’s not real. It only lasts as long as the partner does what we expect them to do, in most cases. As long as they toe the line and do what we want we’re committed to them. It’s love with strings attached.

A woman by the name of Meta Zetty (yes, her real given name) has had some profound experiences in seeing and understanding life. She sees commitment in a relationship in a different way. Instead of committing to your partner she recommends making a commitment to yourself – actually three commitments. “The beauty of this approach to relationships,” she says, “is that maintaining these commitments does not depend on anything that anyone else says or does.”

Her suggestion for three commitments you make to yourself in a relationship are:

1. Be yourself. This means you’re 100% authentic in the relationship rather than trying to live up to what your date or partner might want, or what you think they might want. You don’t pretend to be something you’re not, you don’t pretend to like something you don’t, you just honestly be who you are. Your regular date may decide she wants to be with someone who lives differently and you may lose that dating partner. But you feel appreciation and love for yourself because you’ve been honest with yourself and with her.

2. Tell the truth, which means the real truth about what you’re feeling and experiencing in the moment. That’s not as easy as it sounds when your partner asks you to go out tonight and you say you really just want to be home alone and read. It means saying what you feel, not sharing theories or beliefs. And you’re sharing what you feel. Statements you make sound like, “I feel…” not “You should…” or “You always…”. Saying the truth doesn’t mean confessing past secrets either, or telling what you expect in the future. It’s always just in the present moment.

3. Accept responsibility for your feelings. This acknowledges that no one else is responsible for how we feel about our present experience. If we’re feeling hurt or pain of any kind – sadness, disappointment, jealousy, anger – it’s because we’re arguing with what’s real. And that’s no one else’s fault. Remember, what’s real is what is actually happening, not what we think should happen or what we want to happen. “What is” always rules.

These aren’t easy commitments to live by but the beauty of them is that they’ll work every time, no matter what the other person says or does. You live naturally, easily and happily because you’re simply allowing the truth of who you are to shine unimpeded.

Copyright © 2005 Chuck Custer

53. Your dating relationship doesn't have to end in anger and disgust

We’d like to think that as we’ve gotten older we’ve also gotten wiser, more loving and compassionate. Many people feel they have a “lot of love to give” to a relationship, as some women have expressed it to me. We’d like to have compansionship and love, so we can share those feelings of warmth, nurturing and care. But when a relationship ends or has some sour outcomes we might be surprised to find our feelings of love and compassion disappear, replaced with feelings of anger and vengeance.

How can that happen so suddenly? Someone you say you care about so much is suddenly a hateful character in your eyes. It happens because we’ve been programmed to think that things are supposed to go a certain way in relationships. We think there’s supposed to be honesty and integrity and good will. There’s not supposed to be cheating and deceit and unkindness, for instance.

But the world is made up of both of these elements isn’t it? To know there is honesty there must also be dishonesty. Knowing happiness only comes from having felt unhappiness. We live in a dualistic world – pleasure/pain, good/bad, right/wrong, inner/outer. Nature is a reminder of that with its calm and stormy weather, the ebb and flow of the tides, the blossoming and dying of flowers. We’re a part of that nature – human nature. So we can expect life will have its opposites, and it happens in personalities just as it happens in nature.

When we see that life is just what it is we don’t have to hurt with intense feelings of dislike for what someone says or does. It’s how life is; some are kind, some are unkind. But even these distinctions are not real, because to Life what someone does is just a happening. We’re the ones who put the labels “good” and “bad” on situations. We think we want only the good. But that’s like wanting only happiness. Without unhappiness we wouldn’t even know we were happy would we?

So when we’re dating we can either expect life to always be pleasant and never disappointing, or we can just see life as it is and move on. After a horrendous flood or a devastating hurricane nature just calmly takes up where it left off, without judgment, without opinion. We can do the same when we see the reality of life rather than trying to live by our fairy tale dreams.

Copyright © 2005 Chuck Custer

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

51. Dating is better when you’re not living lies about yourself

What you think of yourself deeply affects how you relate to other people. As a man or woman dating in your senior years your so-called self-image is as critical as it was when you were a teenager just starting in the world of dating.

If this self-image – this idea we have of ourselves – is so important maybe it would be wise to investigate it a bit. We could say that a self image is a compilation of separate ideas we have about ourselves. We’ve grouped them together and now we say “this is me”. It’s a bit like having a bunch of lego blocks scattered on the floor. Then someone comes along and puts them together and builds a house. But is it really a house or is it lego blocks put together to look like a house?

There’s a huge difference between the lego blocks and our building-block ideas of ourselves, however. The blocks are real. Our ideas about ourselves aren’t. Those ideas consist of whatever impressions we have of an event in the past. They’re always faulty, for two reasons. One is that our interpretation of an event could have been wildly inaccurate because of things such as our age at the time, our emotional state, our fears, our programming, and more.

The second reason our building block ideas are faulty is that our minds only remember a very small amount of what actually happened in an event. Think back to the last conversation you had with someone. It may have lasted for 10 minutes, yet if you relate it to someone else you can only remember about a minute’s worth of the dialogue. And you don’t remember that during that talk you scratched your forehead and saw a bird flying by out the window. Even worse, you can’t remember that great joke your friend told you. You couldn’t possibly remember all the things that happened in that time.

So with our imprecise memory of events and thoughts over months and years we form ideas that seem as solid as building blocks. Then we take these erroneous building block ideas and build our house which we call “me”. That’s how we define ourselves. From then on everything in life is referenced to this false sense of “me” or “I” and we don’t even know it’s false. If our building block ideas were made up of impressions of our unworthiness and inadequacy we’re working with malformed blocks. The “me” that we think we are, then, is pretty distorted. And that skewed “me” is what we present to the person we’re dating. It’s not true but we present it as though it is.

If we see ourselves as not very appealing how do you think we present ourselves? Probably not very confidently. And how are we perceived? Probably pretty much the way we present ourselves. You don’t have to be a genius to see through a person with a low self-image. It shows from their every pore, in every movement they make doesn’t it? They either look and act as unworthy or they may project elaborate pretenses to try to appear good enough.

What’s the image you project? Whether you’re in your 50s, 60s, 70s or beyond you might want to investigate what kind of self-idea you’re putting out in the world as you date? Ask yourself, Is my idea of me really true? After all, this “me” you think you are is just your own bundle of ideas. Are they true? Were they ever true when you really look?

If you feel even the slightest sense of inadequacy or unworthiness you don’t have to keep believing that self-created picture. Instead, explore, investigate, question and see the truth. Break the shell of a false self-image and let the natural, loving, genuine self that’s the essence of every person shine through in you. I guarantee dating and life will be better when you’re not living lies about yourself.

Copyright © 2005 Chuck Custer

50. When you “secure” your relationship you lock your partner in prison

In the last article, I wrote about how the need for security leads to the desire to have an exclusive dating relationship with someone. When we think we have to compete to get what we want in life it’s natural that we’ll try to tie things down so we can feel more secure. Especially in our senior years many tend to feel fear for the future, and they want security. In relationships it’s usually called commitment.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with commitment at all when it’s freely given. But when Jane tries to pin Joe to a commitment he’s not ready to make there’s a problem. Jane, of course, wants a guarantee that her dream man will be there for her so she wants to lock things up, to make sure things don’t change and he doesn’t leave. But Joe feels like he’s being forced into prison.

Trying to make sure nothing changes in your relationship is not the way the world works. It works exactly the opposite. Change is the very foundation of this world. There has to be movement, which is change. Without movement everything becomes stale and dies, like a lake that has no inlet or outlet. Soon it stagnates and dies. Our very bodies prove that change is the norm. We breathe in and out, our heart pulses and rests, then pulses again, our thoughts change moment to moment. In nature the tides come in and out, seasons come and go, day turns to night and to day again. There’s a to and fro in life, an activity and a rest. It’s all about movement and change.

Yet we somehow think we can make life secure. So we want to fence in our partner, like a horse in a corral. But is it even possible to guarantee someone will be there for you? Maybe they’ll die tomorrow. We seem to know that, yet we want to control everything we can, especially that our guy or gal won’t be free to find someone else attractive. That feeling comes from fear, but is it honestly what you want for someone you profess to care about? Do you want to imprison them so they can’t possibly find someone new? Or would you feel more loving by allowing your date or partner to feel free to find anyone in the world? If they stay with you they stay freely, not out of obligation. If they move on, isn’t it pretty clear that they feel happier with someone else? And wouldn’t you be happier with someone new who wanted to be with you rather than someone who felt forced to be there?

There is no security in this life, no matter how much we may want it. Gravity always pulls toward the earth, not away from it. Water is always wet. And life constantly changes. We’re happy when we ride along with “what is” instead of trying to squeeze life into the shape we want. You can’t defy gravity and you can’t defy change. Go with it and live a life of ease.

Copyright © 2005 Chuck Custer