The Human Condition
At some point in their life, most people experience a sense of mental and emotional disturbance that troubles them deeply and to which they can’t find an easy solution.
These episodes of disturbance can happen anytime, and more than once.
A toddler may feel unsafe in their surroundings and express their distress even before they can speak.
A few years later, at school, they may experience feeling intimidated or self-conscious.
As a teenager, they may be caught in unhealthy comparisons, feel excluded or not able to cope.
Such issues may continue as they venture into the world of work and relationships. They may be overwhelmed by concerns of inadequacy and loneliness or by rage and frustration.
In the middle years, they may face disillusionment at the collapse of previously held innocent and romantic visions about the ideal of a human life or have to cope with the passing of ones they held dear.
Or perhaps they may find that life has dealt them unwelcome challenges as they struggle with ill health or face the sickness and ultimately the mortality of the body.
Given how easily the mind can roam of its own accord, such mental disturbances can seem as though they are part and parcel of being human and can lead to truly existential angst. They can occur multiple times and with varying intensity at different times and may manifest in such a way that the individual may find themselves experiencing everything at once.
Thus, at some point or the other in life, people will inevitably find themselves feeling totally overwhelmed and massively ill equipped to cope with all that life throws at them. They will lack the mental tools to live a life free from the fear of lack of control and free from the stress, anxiety and emotional disturbance that this creates. This, in essence, is the human condition.
Unless provided with the correct information that ignites and nurtures one’s own power of self-reflection, one may even fail to appreciate the need to discover the workings of the mind and may never understand the formula that facilitates liberation.
The Solution
Self-reflection is where the mental emancipation begins. As with it, we start to become aware of the universal nature of the mind and the relationship we have with our own body, mind and emotions as well as that of others. One of the first things we become more consciously aware of, is that everything we experience is transient yet, what we hope to find, is something that is permanent.
This observation becomes a key point of inspiration as it opens the door to deeper aspects of awareness that are not ordinarily accessible to the reasoning mind, nor to the mind caught up in the tumult of emotion and anxiety.
Our objective is to find peace in the uproar of life around us, to look through all our experiences and to realise that a bound mind will only ever see problems while a liberated mind has the capacity to recognise the solution. Our negative responses are rooted within our minds: the varied feelings of anxiety, helplessness, frustration, anger…, these are all part of the functioning of our mind. However, the liberated mind will always work for us, and bring us to an understanding of that which is permanent.
Developing the awareness to overcome the experience of endless becomings and un-becomings, increases the ability to catch the permanent space of neutrality in between what is experienced as the trigger and the triggered. If one is able to hold the attention on that space of neutrality with full awareness, one comes to see that the energy of the emotion that has arisen as a result of the trigger, doesn’t actually need to follow through to being triggered. It will subside of its own accord, like a wave collapsing back into the ocean, and the energy that would have been lost by being triggered is preserved. The more familiar we become with that permanent space of neutrality, the more we come to understand that it is where true refuge will be found.
Through self-reflection and meditation, the deeply embedded triggers start to lose their strength over time and the brain gets re-wired. One awakens a dormant understanding of the permanent self which allows one to identify with this awareness of who they are. As they do so, the less they find themselves constantly throwing fuel on their own fires of disturbance and perhaps not surprisingly, they become better equipped to live life with this new-found fluidity of awareness.
Self-reflection and meditation provide the answer. The deeply embedded triggers start to lose their strength over time and the brain gets re-wired. Through self-reflection and meditation, one awakens a dormant understanding of the permanent self which allows one to identify with this awareness of who they are. As they do so, the less they find themselves constantly throwing fuel on their own fires of disturbance and perhaps not surprisingly, they become better equipped to live life with this new-found fluidity of awareness.
If you are interested in finding out more as to how build your own inner resources of strength, resilience and peace, allowing you to lead the life you truly deserve, join me on this journey of self discovery…