Climb the Ladder. Choose your Pain

Choose Your Pain. Climb the Ladder.

I am inspired to write this based in part on my current favorite book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.  A Spiritual Journey is usually framed as a kind of grandiose romantic “calling” that requires little effort other than “listening” to your “guides” and preaching to an audience that usually turns out to be people who already agree with you or want to agree with you. People don’t like to disagree, or experience what they call “negativity”. This is the era of toxic positivity, part of the new age industry. In reality, nothing is all good, or all bad. And everything has pain. If you rise to success, you suffer the loss of friends and a simpler life as responsibilities and pressures increase. If you choose to leave a relationship that is no longer good for you, you will face the pain of loss and some loneliness even though you have left behind the disrespect of not being valued, or even the pain of abuse. This irreverent and timely book suggests, instead of concentrating on all the joy and rewards you think you might get from achieving some goal or material “thing” in life focus on the new set of challenges and pain the changes will bring. That way, instead of becoming overwhelmed and disappointed in your new “gains” you will be ready to appreciate the “gains” AND be ready to face the new challenges, problems and pains the changes will bring. All change brings new problems that need to be solved.

Solving problems is a key to happiness. Have you ever noticed how people often fall apart after “getting everything they ever wanted”? I have seen this in person as well as in the news when someone wins the lottery or becomes a super-star and neither is prepared for the challenges of success and gain. If you prepare for the challenges ahead, you are no longer “seeking happiness” and unrealistically placing all your hopes and dreams of “feeling good” on external factors and gains. When you are happy with your current situation and a little bored with your current problems that is a good time to look for change. Unfortunately most people wait until they are in extreme pain and then look to make changes to relieve pain with no thought (because they are in pain) of the new challenges that change always brings. People in pain run to a new solution, and “wake up” to find out it is not a magical solution at all but rather a new set of challenges and pains. Then they often run right back to the old pain, because it is familiar, and familiarity is less scary and therefore feels less painful than the new situation. It is a cycle very familiar to therapists watching their clients cycle back and forth in their dysfunction, and to 12-Step people who watch their peers relapse over and over and return to addictions both chemical and emotional (co-dependency). It is very hard to watch this happen to people you love and care about. When someone is cycling, there is nothing another person can do except wait it out, typically for a few years or even a decade or two.

People in the business of helping others would be a better resource if they helped people to see the problems, challenges and new pains they will encounter with each choice in life.  If you cut relations with people who disrespect you, you will be lonely and you will have to actively find new friends and associates. This also happens if you decide to get sober, or reject the religion of you family of origin, or decide not to be a racist any longer and leave the Klu Klux Klan. No matter how excellent your choices, no matter how happy you end up becoming in the long run, you will have to overcome new pain and solve new problems. It comes with the territory. When people are not prepared for this, they feel embarrassed or ashamed for feeling scared or sad when their new circumstances “dictate” they should be unreservedly “happy”. When this happens, they are typically too ashamed, or prideful to admit what is going on and ask for, or receive, help of any kind, even from Spirit. Then they panic and, relapse. Back to the old pain where at least they feel competent and have their “old resources.”

Life is full of pain. You think this is a dismal outlook? What is dismal is the success of the billion dollar industries that sell people hope, motivation, and fantasies (for example, the promise that you will be able lose weight with no exercise and eat whatever you want or what we sell you). The reality is you do choose your pain, every day, with every choice. You are willing to put up with pain to get what you want as everything in life has pain.  You put up with the pain of a dull marriage to have the pleasure of a nice house, inconvenient (or no) sex, lots of food, no challenging conversations and lots of distractions to help you numb out and not feel. You act as a people pleasing over-giver for the pleasure of attention, popularity (albeit a false on), avoiding confrontations, and getting constant feedback of what a “great” person you are. For this you are willing to suffer the pain of a profound loneliness, feeling like a fraud, and the constant pressure of having to find things to “give” to others with no tolerance for your own company preferring to spend your time with “anyone” rather than your Self. You want to look good or feel good, you tolerate (and even motivate yourself) going to the gym.

Now what? Identify the price you are paying for you current choices. Look at your challenges (keeping your mouth shut, agreeing with everyone, numbing out, etc.) and the pain you have become acclimated to living with and see if you still like your choices. Work with someone (12-Step, counselor, Teacher etc.) to identify these things after you have gone as deep as you can by yourself. Again, working with someone, identify what you would like to see happen in your life, in your development, in your Soul Evolution and look at the challenges and new pains you will experience. Like working with a personal trainer who can tell you how you muscles are going to hurt after your new work out, except this will be your psyche, your energy field and your emotions, and those are much more complex. This is why it is rarely possible to travel this path alone. Now make some choices. If you choose to stay where you are, you will no longer choose to be the victim about your circumstances. If you choose to make some changes you will have a mentor, the person or people helping you, the ones you have been talking with and making plans and discussing what may happen and how it will feel. You will not be looking for results with no effort. You will not blame someone for making a suggestion of change for you to try because you will be choosing it and choosing it knowing full well that there will be new unfamiliar changes and new pains as you use new “muscles” to improve your life, your emotions, your psyche and your energy field.

A beautiful and deeply disturbing film that illuminates the existential dilemma of succumbing to numbing out to life choices is a 1964 film titled Woman of the Dunes.

 An entomologist, Jumpei Niki, is on an expedition to collect insects which inhabit sand dunes. Unfortunately (disastrously actually) he misses his last bus and some passing villages suggest he stay the night in their village.  They offer him some assistance with a rope ladder to get down to an odd house that sits half way down a perpetually crumbling sand dune. A young widow lives alone here. She is employed by the villagers to fill buckets of sand which they sell. She also needs to do this to ensure the house doesn’t get buried in the sand.

The next morning, when Jumpei tries to leave, he finds the ladder is missing. The villagers inform him that he must help the widow in her endless task of digging sand. Jumpei initially tries to escape; upon failing he takes the widow captive but is forced to release her in order to receive water from the villagers.

Trapped in their own endless world of cascading sand, and the mindless work that never ends, Jumpei soon becomes the widow’s lover. Despite this, he still desperately wants to leave. He manages to escape at one point, only to find he gets lost and falls into quicksand.  He is found by the villagers and deposited into the woman’s house again.

Eventually, Jumpei resigns himself to his fate. Through his persistent effort to trap a crow as a messenger, he discovers a way to draw water from the damp sand at night. He thus becomes absorbed in the task of perfecting his technology and adapts to his “trapped” life. The focus of the film shifts to the way in which the couple cope with the oppressiveness of their condition and the power of their physical attraction in spite of — or possibly because of — their situation.

At the end of the film Jumpei gets his chance to escape when someone lowers a ladder for him to climb out and begin a new life and escape the endless cycles trapping him. But instead, he chooses to stay in the dune and continue the life he struggled at first to escape. A report after seven years declaring him missing is then shown hanging from a wall, written by the police and signed by his mother Shino.

You can equate this film to watching someone you love get lost in the culture of alcoholism, consumerism, over eating, numbing out, depression, or codependence. It is a difficult film to watch and it clearly illustrates how humans not only learn to adapt to pain, but learn to live with it and give it meaning. At the end, he is given a chance to escape and turns away. He chooses the familiar desolate pain and no longer considers there is any other life available to him. His mother mourns his death. We mourn. Watching this film you will recognie people you know. You might even see your Self.

Choices. You are always making them. Start to examine your life and your choices. However, like Jumpei, you may become blind to your choices and think that there are no other choices than the ones you have already made. Working with a Teacher, exposing yourself to diversity, reading books that challenge your old ways of thinking, taking new actions are some of the many ways you can choose to wake up. No one can make you wake up. A Spiritual Practice (doing a practice, not just reading or talking or doing meaningless rituals hoping for magic to solve your problems)  will take you to a new life and new freedoms you cannot even imagine however you will have to choose to climb the ladder and leave the old behind. 12-Step says the same thing. Good therapists do as well. There are many ladders available.  Jumpei chooses to stay and he does not see himself as a victim. And he does not want help. You cannot help anyone who does not first at least start to climb the ladder.

Journey On

Dr. Marie @Life Path Healings

MarieFeuer.Org