145. Psychological baggage will stop any chance you have for good new relationships

You can’t bring an open, fresh perspective to mature dating when you’re holding onto resentments and hurts from a past marriage or relationship. Those feelings will surely affect any new relationship you try to form. So obviously the solution is to get past those hurt and confused feelings. But how?

The most direct, straightforward way I’ve found is what the masters have been teaching for centuries – investigate and see reality as it is. The only reason we feel painful thoughts of any kind – and the painful feelings that clearly follow those thoughts – is that we hold onto the idea that something shouldn’t have happened. Investigating just means asking yourself, “Since this has already happened is it true it shouldn’t have?” The answer is pretty clear. How are you possibly going to change the past? It’s over. Done. Period.

“Yes,” you may be saying, “she did what she did but that doesn’t make it right. It wasn’t fair to me and now I’m hurting. And you’re telling me I’m causing my own hurt? Come on!” What I’m saying may not feel loving and caring at first, so asking a person to face that they’re responsible for their hurt doesn’t necessarily get applause. No rave reviews for that! But we’re not looking for quick and temporary fixes here. We’re looking for long-term peace and inner joy.

So let’s deal with truth here. The truth, any time we’re hurting psychologically – any time! – is that our own thoughts are the cause, never what someone else has done. Your partner or wife may have done something you consider wrong, let’s say she had affairs and now you’re divorced and bitter.

When we look realistically at life what do we see? Do people have affairs? Yes. Is it a fact of life? Yes. Did it happen? Yes. Can you change it? No. The reality is your partner had affairs. You know it was meant to happen that way because life just is. If it can happen to anyone anywhere it can happen to any of us can’t it?

Then you can ask yourself: How do I feel when I think it shouldn’t have happened? Usually the answer is: miserable. Another question: How would feel if I didn’t have that thought?” The consistent answer is: a lot more peaceful. So then take a look at that original thought: “My wife should not have had affairs” and turn it around: “She should have had affairs.” How do you know that? Because it happened. Simple as that. That’s dealing with reality isn’t it? You’re no longer dealing with false statements. Now you’re dealing with what is. You can ask yourself why she would do it until you have no more breath to ask but you’ll never get the answer. So forget trying to figure it out. Instead, you can put that energy into just dealing with life as it is now.

We’ve been taught all our lives to view life according to a lot of ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’ and therefore argue with it when it isn’t the way we want it. But that’s crazy when reality stares you in the face so unmistakably. In this universe what happens happens. Without our judgments and stories there’s no deep, lasting pain associated with it.

Sure, if your wife leaves you for another man there will be feelings of loss. But if you don’t mentally leave yourself over and over by playing that scene of your wife and her affairs you’ll soon see that life is about change and it’s obviously time for your life to change. Again, how do you know? Because it happened. Reality is reality. What is, is. Period. Stop arguing with it and be at peace and able to move on. Harbor judgment and feed it by playing it over and over again and you prolong your misery. Suffering is always optional.

Copyright © 2006 Chuck Custer

144. See life as it is and mature dating is guaranteed to be pain-free and contented

If you’ve read any of the articles here about senior dating you know that I’m saying dating can be pleasant and enjoyable just like any other part of life when we relax into reality and see how life really works. That means we let go of thinking we know how life should be, because how we think it should be just isn’t true. It’s our imagination telling us stories. Our shoulds and oughts are just fantasies.

This is one way to look at it: We don’t think the sun should come up in the north or the west, just for variety. We don’t think gravity should pull things up just for fun. We don’t think the wind shouldn’t blow. No, we accept these as just the way life happens, and we realize we have no control over the way nature works.

Same with our bodies. Nature takes care of all the functions – moving cells around, growing hair and nails, digesting food, breathing us – all of it. It’s also nature – or you could call it God if you want, a term I don’t often use because it has so many loaded messages – that produces what we call the mental part of us. We don’t control thoughts, for instance. They happen. When they’re painful we don’t know how to switch them off to give ourselves a rest. And we don’t start them in the morning after we wake up either. They just happen, like the wind, gravity and your heart beating.

Yet at a very early age we picked up the idea that there’s a “me” here who has control. And control means we know how things should go and by golly we’re going to have them go that way. But reality doesn’t care what thoughts show up in our heads. Thoughts in our heads are just part of the game, like beautiful weather and hurricanes. I know, that’s hard to get hold of. The mind thinks it knows answers, and people on spiritual paths that I personally know have sometimes been seeking Truth for 20 and 30 years.

But Truth isn’t so hard to see when you simply realize each of us is part of the functioning of life. Applied to dating in our mature years what this means is that when we simply observe life as it is it can be a content and happy experience. You meet people, you date, you may fall in love but you don’t have an agenda and you’re not locked into having things go your way. Instead, you see that it’s meant to go the way it goes. Why? No reason. It just is!

Next time you find yourself emotionally suffering you could stop and ask yourself, “What am I thinking should be different from the way it is?” In other words, what are you judging? It’s something, you can be sure. You’re either judging a situation, like the government or the price of gas, or you’re judging a person, like the woman you’re dating. Just notice that whenever you’re hurting emotionally you’re disagreeing with the way life is at the moment.

You think there’s an independent “you” who has some independent power. But “you” have no power at all. You exist strictly at the pleasure of that Power which manifests everything. One year ago today my dad died. He was 93 and my brothers and I were at his bedside. One moment there was life in his body, the next moment there was none. The same eyes and ears and lungs and heart were there but they weren’t functioning any more. Why? Because the apparent “he” was never really a separate entity with independent power. And obviously the Power that was expressing itself as Dad no longer needed that body on this earth.

Small children haven’t yet learned that they supposedly have control so they’re at ease and happy with whatever happens, as long as they’re not hurting physically. That’s their natural state, as it is ours. All we need to do to live a naturally happy and peaceful life, including our dating life, is to simply be without thinking “we” or any circumstance or person should be different. That’s it. This is life! To argue with it is just crazy, and sometimes really painful. Worse, we’ll never, ever win.

Copyright © 2006 Chuck Custer