57. When senior dating makes you hurt here’s how to watch pain dissolve

Let’s say your dating has left you disappointed or angry, or feeling abandoned or jealous. Whatever it is, something is causing you to hurt emotionally. Yesterday I talked about how we label things and that labeling causes the hurt to last longer and feel stronger. Why is that true? Because the label is just a word, a thought, it’s not the reality. Have you ever noticed how something you worried so much about turns out to be much less painful in reality than your worried thoughts about it? That’s because we’ve dredged up a lot of painful memories from the past that we’ve slapped onto the thing with our label.

Without a label an emotion is just a sensation in your body. If you look around the room you’re sitting in right now do you have to tell yourself you’re seeing it? No, the seeing is just happening isn’t it? In the immediacy of what is you’re just seeing, before thoughts and labels come up. So let’s say you’re feeling a sensation you call fear right now. As soon as you label it you’re not seeing it fresh, just now, as it is. With your added label you’re now experiencing what that label means to you. But it’s based on what? It’s based on a dead past. You’re dragging in a past that doesn’t even exist except in your mind.

You say you’re feeling fear, and you remember all those terrible experiences you associate with fear in the past. Pretty soon you’re putting a lot of energy into that label, “fear”. Your natural reaction then is to resist those painful feelings and in thinking about it and resisting it what happens? Energy is fed into it and it grows and grows. Remember, without energy a thing just dies, even a thought or a label, which is just a word for a thought.

Bankei, a Zen monk of about the 16th century, said, “Everything is perfectly resolved in the unborn. Why exchange the unborn for thought?” What he means by the unborn is just what arises spontaneously and in the moment. He’s saying when we just see it and leave it alone it will resolve itself. When we exchange that simple seeing of “what is” with thoughts and labels we’ve turned it into something it’s not.

The way through an emotion, whether we label it fear or loneliness or jealousy or anger, is to just be with it. See it as it is, just in its freshness and immediacy, like you see the room before thoughts about the room come in. In just the clear seeing of a sensation, when it’s not fed energy by labeling it and resisting it, you might be surprised at how fast it runs its natural course and just disappears.

Yes, it may come up again because our habit is to label and resist. But once we’ve seen that the label isn’t the real, and the real is never as bad as the label, we can just drop the label again and be with what is. You’ve already seen that the label is not true so you don’t get stuck in that any longer. Then what are you left with? Just Being, contentedness.

Copyright © 2006 Chuck Custer