Monday, November 9, 2009

Participating in Life

Today, with rising unemployment, out-of-control deficits and growing personal debts, there's a deep feeling of anger and rage overwhelming many of us. It's difficult for us to understand why we feel this way, because it seems like nearly everyone is feeling this way. Even so, we don't like how we're feeling.

Whenever we have too many problems, we tend to have these nagging, empty feelings of doubt gnawing away at us. Some of us frequently seek ways to handle our problems without complaining too much about them. It seems easier to keep them to ourselves. So we quietly close the doors to our emotions and allow the suffering to exist painfully within the silence of our minds.

Similarly, as we suffer with our deep emotional pain, we desperately want someone, other than us, to accept responsibility for causing us to feel so badly. This pattern of behavior -- seeking to place responsibility for our problems on others -- keeps us inextricably tied to victim beliefs. And whenever we don't know exactly what's bothering us, we find that it's easy to blame others -- society, leaders, employers, spouses, relatives, and so on -- for the way we are feeling about ourselves.

The phenomenon of emotional overwhelming is the essence of why we feel powerless to confront our problems. To feel powerless is to feel overwhelmed by out-of-control emotions. And none of this happens without problems. Our problems dictate how we response to things.

Deep within our emotional pain and suffering is an awareness of who we are in any given moment in time. And regardless to what we tell others, we cannot change who we are. The more we try to control the anger and rage, the more we suffer in silence, and the more anger and rage we feel.

To feel your emotions as they really are means acting on them. To do this requires a strong desire to change our belief system. This also means we must make a serious commitment to stop suffering from the pain caused by our willingness to face our problems and emotions.

When we decide to change and begin our search to achieve enlightenment, we become mindful of our behavior and the thoughts producing this behavior. This allows us to move beyond intellectual skepticism to intuitive exploration. This is when we begin to feel and accept our pain.

To feel something is to know it. The closer we get to it the more we're willing to examine what's there before us. In other words, we're no longer afraid of our emotions.

Nevertheless, try as we do to ignore our feelings, we return to what we are most comfortable with: blaming others for our problems. After awhile, we believe this is the way life is supposed to be. By blaming others, we absolve ourselves. We do this by not becoming actively engaged in our lives and relationships with others in the world. We lose ourselves in emotional apathy.

For some of us, sitting on the sidelines of life is a comfortable place to be. We can observe what's happening as spectators. From this position, we are able to criticize the activities of others while we sit idly by perpetuating a culture of silence and disassociation from life.

In the meantime, we don't plan to do anything about the problems and issues others are passionately fighting for. Although we might feel very strongly about some the problems and issues others are fighting for, we don't want to risk further pain by becoming involved ourselves. So we continue to suffer in silence, fearful of our emotions and their overwhelming affect on us.

Some of us want to do something, but we don't want to upset others, particularly our parents, friends, children, and loved ones. WE find it satisfying to remain victimized by our feelings than risk losing or changing our relationships with those we respect and love. So we silently trod along through life, suffering from the cancerous emotions destroying our will to live successful lives.

Meanwhile, as enlightenment-seekers whenever we feel empowered, we also feel free. To achieve this freedom we must be willing to not only face our problems and emotions, but accept them for what they represent to us. And like it or not, they are a part of us.

To be clear here, power and powerless are not being discussed in accepted societal definitions of the words. We are using them to express feelings produced from beliefs acquired over years of believing ourselves to be victims (powerless).

It's very difficult for some of us to ever accept ourselves as victims. To be a victim in this world is to accept ourselves as failures. Victims live on the bottom of the hierarchical rung of class distinctions. This also means it's very difficult to face our problems and emotions and welcome them into our lives.

For further insights on this subject, please read "Seeds from the Ashes." It's currently available on http://www.amazon.com/

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