Make the suffering go away

[Excerpt from WELL, getting real with physical and mental health]

At the moment of writing this chapter, the on-line course ‘WELL: getting real with mental and physical health’ is underway. I have had emails this morning from four different people on the course all saying essentially the same thing:

‘Make the suffering stop. It is overwhelming. Take away the anguish. Make me feel better. I’ve tried everything. This is my last hope.’

Maybe we all know that desperation. It might not be suffering in relation to health. It might be about our partner or money or family or career or anything.

But the plea is the same ‘make the suffering stop’. And we try everything to get rid of it. All the time trying to get rid of the sensation of dis-ease, discomfort, insecurity, desperation through whatever means available.

And all the focus and effort is on the pushing away and numbing, on the resisting and squashing.

There is no enquiry into what is actually causing the suffering. And I don’t mean what is causing the pain or the illness - I mean what is causing the resistance to whatever is, the idea that what is should be different.

None of the attention is on what is actually true.  The cacophony of thoughts about the future, the past, the comparisons with others, the identity that springs from the suffering goes unquestioned.

There is pushing away of whatever is being experienced and there is complete belief in whatever is being thought.

And that is the way of it.

That is the conditioned sleepwalking that we are all doing until a kiss from a prince (or perhaps a book… if indeed books can kiss… I’m sure they can… ) breaks the trance and wakes us up.

And the waking state is reality. It is sanity and truthfulness and just what is.

The waking is the opposite of the sleepwalking.

In sleepwalking, we resist experience, we resist the sensations of the body and live the unquestioned reality of thought and belief.

The waking state turns that upside down. The body, that fluid living intelligence, is honoured, noticed, attended to. The narrative story is understood for what it is - the workings of a frantic mind.

The waking is simply presence to all of this.

The waking is the realisation that no thought or belief or concept, including that epicentre of the whole caboodle - the concept of self, is true.

There is no peace or freedom for the thought-created self no matter how hard it tries to control itself and the world around it.

The peace and freedom are there already. It’s just that all that searching for them is obscuring them.

The revelation of that peace and freedom is what we had been looking for all along. And the search had made us iller, more burdened and more exhausted.

Now there is the falling away of what we are not.  The ending of the search for the unobtainable.

The simple sanity of living as the pure source intelligence that we are.