Blinded by the peaks and valleys of wins and losses

How good are you at loving your stress?

That was the most powerful question my therapist ever asked me.

Because our goal is not to be free from stress, but to learn to live with it differently. To change our relationship to it. To meet stress as a product of our own mind, not as something that just magically materialized from people and events in our environment.

Without that kind of loving posture, we will continue to treat stress as an external enemy that we have to battle, rather than an internal messenger that has come to teach us something very important about ourselves.

And it’s funny, psychologists have been telling us for years that there is good stress, aka, eustress; and bad stress, aka, distress, and our distinction of the two is the secret to feeling better.

Biologically, that’s true and probably useful. But the problem with binary terms like good or bad and right or wrong is that they’re deeply judgmental. And although we love using these dichotomies to validate our ego and categorize and control everything, it’s mostly a false distinction that causes additional psychic pain.

Blinded by the peaks and valleys of wins and losses, as the mystics say.

Here’s another question worth asking:

Who were you before you defined things as good or bad, right or wrong?

The short answer is, more blissful. The long answer is, someone who allowed themselves to be defined by their relationship to life, rather than good or bad things they’ve done within in it.

Williamson’s bestselling book on the spiritual journey to inner peace states that the only real problem is a lack of love. That affirming that love is our priority in a situation.

Which calls back my therapist’s original question:

How good are you at loving your stress?

In fact, go replace the word stress with whatever experience is currently at the center of your suffering. How good are you at loving it? And if that concept still sounds saccharine and impractical to you, if a thoroughly loving person seems like some evolutionary mutation, that’s okay too.

In my experience, however, we feel the happiest when we greet our feelings with loving acceptance and passionate detachment, rather than trying to categorize and control them.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
Are you treating your feelings as enemies or information?