195. Thoughts of your dating past or future create suffering and they’re never real, have you noticed?

As we’ve talked about a number of times here, dating can bring up a lot of emotions, many of them pretty painful when things aren’t going our way. Sometimes, for seniors, the emotions are poignantly agonizing because we may feel that our time is running out, so the pressure is on to find a mate, and it may not be happening.

Emotions are born of thoughts. They show up when we believe thoughts that appear before us. Those thoughts may be happy memories, and the associated emotions are calming and joyful. If the thoughts are stressful our emotions are painful.

When we’re dating it’s easy for the mind to work overtime – worrying about this, wondering about that. We want to try to control things. And we think our thoughts will help us do that. But in reality believing our thoughts only makes life miserable. Your dating experiences, as all of life, will be what they are.

Life only happens in this single instant – the one that’s over before you can name it. Thoughts, too, only appear in this instant. Thoughts of your dating past often bring up guilt, shame, and regret. Think of the future and you often feel fear. But either way we miss the immediacy of the only real moment there ever is, this moment. True, we’re living through the moment because we can’t live any other time, but because our focus is on the past or future we’re missing the experience of it. It’s like reading when your mind wanders somewhere else. You have to read the paragraph over again. When we replace this now, which never has a problem, with thoughts of another time we can be in a world of hurt, hurt that only we’ve created.

If you want your dating to be pleasureful and painless notice how often your thoughts are of past or future. You don’t have to try to stop thoughts since you can’t anyway. But when you notice them and investigate them you can see they’re not reality. Thoughts are nothing but a dream. Past and future can’t even exist except in thought. So why pay attention to thoughts? Let them pass and you’re left with this moment – happy, at ease, without problems. From this place you can watch life unfold as it always does, without asking for your input. Let the adventure begin, and welcome home!

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer