73. Watch your emotional hurt evaporate when you stop resisting its pain

Seniors, like anyone else, are in the dating world because we want companionship and love, a natural response to life. It seems to be who we are, having a desire to pair up with a partner. Sometimes, however, that desire can get out of hand and create a great deal of pain in our lives. At those times we feel like victims of that suffering. There seems to be nothing we can do.

Desire, when you look at it, is nothing but a fixation on a particular thought. The thought is about something that looks attractive to the mind. In relationships the desire is to be with the person we’re dating, perhaps to make it a more permanent coupling. Suffering comes in when we realize the focus of our desire doesn’t feel the same way. We’ve probably all experienced that the pain from unrequited love can seemingly overtake life. We can’t eat, we can’t function very well, we look for ways of escape in running away or keeping extra busy. But your thoughts keep going back to the love you think you have to have, as persistently as your tongue goes to a tooth in your mouth that a dentist has just worked on.

One thing the mystics and ancient teachers have said throughout the centuries is that peace comes from accepting what is, just as it is. In the case of that gut ache that comes from a breaking heart that means to do the opposite of what we’ve learned to do. We’ve learned to try to escape it. But instead of running from the pain the unbelievable answer is to just be with it. Watch how it unfolds, without doing anything with it or trying to add or substract anything.

Instead of putting a label on it and translating it into a concept, a word, you just let it be. Be with it. Doing this, you wouldn’t say to yourself “I’ve lost my lover”. And you wouldn’t say to yourself that it’ll be better soon when she wants me as much as I want her. Instead, if there’s attraction there just see the attraction and let it run its normal course. See what happens.

When feelings are translated into thoughts and labels by the mind they seem solid, they transform into a thing in appearance. It’s not really the case, but it seems that way. That thing then becomes a knot in the gut or an ache in the heart. Yet there’s no physical cause; it’s all just physical reaction based on thought. A mass of energy has gathered and built up which in turn causes us to focus more on it and it continues to grow, in a vicious circle. Of course you resist the pain and the very resistance holds the idea – and remember it’s just an idea – in place and makes it more solid. Without resistance, with just watching and observing instead, as a scientist would, it dissipates and dissolves.

When you have a knot in your stomach if you look for it in your body you’ll realize you can find no self center or core to it. And as you look your attention is naturally taken off the cause of the gut reaction (my lover is gone) and so the effect of that thought (your hurting gut) has to disappear because it’s not real and never was real. It’s only a thought-made thing that appears real.

So next time you feel pain and hurt because of something that happens in a relationship or your dating, remember that thought can’t be in two places at the same time. If the intensity of your thought is in investigating the feeling rather than fixating on your desire, your suffering will dissolve instead of continuing to grow. In life, thoughts show up on their own and leave on their own, usually in pretty short order – unless we latch onto them by trying to change them or resist them. Stop the resisting and just focus on the feeling, accepting it as it is and it dissolves. It may come back again a time or two but when it does, handle it the same way. Look at it with clear eyes without wanting or needing it to change, and you’ll see it evaporate.

Copyright © 2006 Chuck Custer