Why do we suffer? This is one of the fundamental questions to investigate if we’re going to find lasting happiness in this life.
Because we don’t really “find” lasting happiness, happiness is already our natural and default state.
It is independent of external circumstances and conditions. So to understand the causes for happiness, we have to understand what is continually pulling us out of our natural state, which is what we call suffering. None of us want to suffer, but very few of us take the time to truly investigate how and why it arises until our suffering is so great that we hit rock bottom and are thrust into our investigation by force. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Whether you’re at rock bottom at this moment or not, I invite you to launch your investigation now. And as a fellow detective, I’ll give you some tips.
See For Yourself
Immersing yourself in consuming content, can be helpful for ideas, inspiration, and motivation, but ultimately the real progress comes from studying your own personal experience, not studying the conclusions others have reached in their investigations. Treat books and videos like an advisor. Turn to them when you’re stuck or perhaps need a little pep talk to carry on, but don’t confuse your meetings with your advisor with the investigation itself. Imagine if you were writing a doctoral dissertation and you showed up to your weekly meeting with your advisor asking for more advice, but you hadn’t done any work since your last meeting. They would probably tell you to stop wasting their time.
Every minute studying your own experience is worth an hour of content consumption.
So after you finish this post, don’t go and read 10 more posts and watch 10 more videos on the causes for suffering, just start investigating.
Stick With Your Own Experience
It’s much easier for us to observe others who are suffering and draw conclusions.
In fact, we love doing this, judging others give us a sense of superiority and diverts attention off the junk we don’t want to look at within ourselves.
Let’s not forget this investigation isn’t about others. It’s also not about proselytizing your findings and so you can be seen as the next Buddah. It’s about you and your happiness.
It’s about self-awareness, which is knowing how your individual mind operates, so you can eventually become Self-aware, which is knowing that you are not your mind, which is the source of lasting happiness.
Your mind is it’s own unique code base, with it’s own collection of if/then programs, coded in by your life experiences. Your job is to know yours inside out. What are your programs that cause suffering? When do they get triggered? What purpose are they serving? Are they still useful? The benefits to others will come by the new way you show up in the world. Outdated software is of no use to anyone.
Get To Know Your Diversions
The best opportunity to gain insight into your suffering is in the moment of suffering. This is where the magic happens. This is when class is in session. This is when you can observe and get an unbiased understanding of what’s really happening in real-time. But unfortunately, it’s also the hardest moment to be an impartial observer. It’s like our mind get’s hijacked and we completely lose ourselves. We get angry at others, blame ourselves, shut down, zone out, dive into work, open Facebook, pour a glass of wine, open the fridge, hit the gym, or even using positive affirmations. We’ll do anything to run away. The way we run away depends on our programming, some maybe more harmful than others, but they are all forms of diversion, taking the attention away from the suffering, and thwarting your investigation.
Your diversions are the survival instincts of the programs that cause you suffering.
IF suffering THEN run like hell. It’s like a core protection program that protects all the other programs. So, if this is a program you have, which is highly likely, I invite you to start with this one. Get to know your diversions. Notice what you are feeling just prior to or while playing them out. Remind yourself that this is a golden opportunity to further your investigation. And overtime you will gradually retrain your program to: IF suffering THEN stop.
In the beginning you may not catch yourself until hours or even days after you are triggered, but don’t be discouraged, it’s never too late to investigate, and overtime that window will lessen. Eventually you’ll be able to get to the point where the moment a heavy emotion arises, instead of resisting and suffering, your first reaction is allowing and gratitude. Instead of “Why me?” it’s “Thank you.” Thank you for giving me this opportunity to further my investigation by shining a light on a program that is holding me back from experiencing life fully. Not only does this approach help you understand your own mind and contribute to long term happiness, but it also reduces the amount of suffering in moment. Most of the suffering comes from “resistance”, or running away from the heavy emotion that arises. Our default program is IF suffering THEN something is wrong. Over time as we train ourselves to stay with our heavy emotions, it becomes: IF suffering THEN I have an opportunity for greater happiness.
Instead of feeling like a helpless victim to your negative emotions, you feel empowered to channel them into insight, and understand they are the invitation to greater happiness and joy that you kept rsvp’ing “F Off”.
Feel It To Heal It
If you’ve managed to catch yourself amidst a moment of suffering, congratulations, you’ve already won half the battle! The next step is to release the negative emotion and gain insight into the associated program. There are many techniques you can use at this stage, but I described one that has worked for me below.
1. Find somewhere you can be alone: this can be tricky, especially since we’re often trigged when we’re around people, but try to excuse yourself. Releasing emotions isn’t pretty and you’re likely to not let yourself fully “go there” if you’re around people.
2. Lay down: I’ve found this works better when you’re lying down, but you’ll have to work with what you’ve got in the situation. I’ve had many powerful self-healing sessions on the toilets of public restrooms. Who knows, you may inspire your co-pilot in the next stall!
3. Feel it: this is the most important step. Try to fully be present with the emotion, welcome it. Try to notice if there is an accompanying sensation in your body e.g. tightness in your chest. If so, focus on the sensation in addition to the emotion. I recommend putting a finger or two on the area where you feel the sensation to keep your attention there. You have to feel it to heal it!
4. Enhance it: ramp up the negative emotion by allowing more of it to come through. You can replay the scenario that triggered you in your mind, replay related scenarios from the past, or even imagine fictional scenarios that trigger the same emotion. Imagine your partner or ex with a new lover. Imagine your business or career crashing and burning. Imagine that time your mom or dad yelled at you, that time kids at school made fun of you, or that time you were screwed over by a friend or colleague. This may seem counterintuitive, but the more trapped emotional energy comes to the surface, the more gets released. And the more that gets released here, the less gets released on others.
5. Let it rip: Allow the program to say and do whatever it wants to. Become the program. “I @#%’ing hate you, you lying #@%!” “How could you leave me after all I’ve done for you!?”, “All you care about is yourself!”, “You’re suffocating me, just go away!”, “Need me, want me, love me!”, “Nothing I do ever works out”, “I should be_____”, “I shouldn’t have _____.” Cry your eyes out, strangle your pillow; the key is to get out of your head and become the anger, become the sadness, become the frustration. Don’t hold back. I’ve gotten up on all fours, on my bed, growling like a wild animal! Have no shame. One of the things that keep these programs in place is suppression. We suppress them because we are ashamed of them. In many modern communities, especially spiritual communities, it’s not socially acceptable to yell or cry, so the anger and sadness get bottled up and stored in the body. Pushing down suppressed emotions when you’re suffering is like not allowing yourself to throw up when you’re nauseous. Plus it’s coming up eventually, so better to throw up in the bathroom than in someone’s face. So this is the time to let it all out. The more you let go of control here, the more you’ll be in control the next time you’re triggered.
6. Rest and reflect: lay back down and relax with your arms by your sides and your palms up. Notice how you’re feeling, e.g. lighter, calmer. Notice any sensations in your body e.g. tingling. The mind is usually quite calm at this stage, which allows insight to come through. This is a great time to also ask yourself some questions about the program you just let out of the cage. What does it want? What purpose has it served in your life? Why was it created? What part of you is holding onto it? For example, “It wants to be recognized, feel important, feel loved. It was created because I never received the love and attention I desired from my father, so it was created to gain that approval elsewhere. Try not to answer the questions, just hold them or softly repeat them in your mind and allow the insights to come naturally. Then at the end try to distill the program down to it’s core. For example, IF I don’t receive recognition, THEN it means I’m not lovable. Or in other words, amount of recognition is proportional to worth.
7. Find the truth: now that you’ve identified the core program, challenge it. Ask yourself, “is this really true? Do other’s opinions have anything to do with me? Or does it have more to do with them and their programs? Does receiving or not receiving recognition really ‘mean’ anything at all? Or is that something I made up? “This part can be helpful to do in writing, as the back and forth can uncover even more sub-programs. For example, you might reply, “Yes, recognition does mean something. That’s how we know if someone is successful, other people acknowledge what they’ve achieved.” Aha! Now you’ve seen another program. Now you ask again, “is that really true? Is it possible to feel worthy, lovable, and successful independent of anyone’s acknowledgement? Is it possible that I only perceive people who receive a lot recognition as more successful because of this program? Yeah, maybe that’s why I always envy others who receive recognition! But everyone else values people based on the amount of recognition they receive.” Another program bubbles up! “Do you know that for sure? Well, not really, it’s just metric of value that is probably highly dependent on personal, cultural, and community values. Even if everyone did believe it, would that make it true? Well, no, the masses are highly suggestible and believe a lot ridiculous stuff. Everyone once thought the world was flat.” A hint for you, none of your programs are true at the end of the day, zero, they are just arbitrary lines of legacy code. But you still have to go through the process of challenging them in order to unpack all the layers and sub-programs and toss them all into the fire of truth. All these programs are, is a series of lies that we’re repeated over and over, validated with the evidence of experiences that we’re attracting and drawing meaning from, and then believed. This is why we’re suffering. Because lies hurt. Suffering is just believing lies. That’s all this process is about. When you suffer, tune into what lie (or program) you believe, and restate the truth. We are constantly being drawn back to our natural state of love, peace, happiness, and truth. The suffering is just the torch shining light on your lies. Lies always feel tight, heavy, limiting, constraining, and divisive because they oppose the natural state we’re trying to return to. The truth always feels open, light, empowering, free, and integrated because it is in alignment with reality and our natural state. The truth shall set you free!
8. Assess the impact: ask yourself, how does this program impact my life? How is running me? What new choices can I now make? Re-examine your behaviors, decisions, and patterns, in the light of this insight. Continuing our example, “IF I don’t receive recognition, THEN it means I’m not lovable.” “My entire desire to be a successful entrepreneur is being driven by this program. I thought that being a successful entrepreneur would provide me with positive recognition within my culture, community, and family, and that would mean I was worthy, lovable, and valuable. It put so much pressure on me. No wonder my entire state of happiness was tied to how well my business was doing. My business failing meant no recognition, which mean I wasn’t worthy or lovable. Man that was exhausting! What a relief. Now I can finally do what I’ve been wanting to do for years and go on an epic adventure around the world! And maybe I’ll continue my running business while I travel, but not because I need to be successful, just because it’s a fun creative outlet, I feels good to provide value to others, and it continues to push me to learn and grow. If it makes a lot of money, that’s cool, if not, that’s cool too. And how about dating, my entire desire to date a lot of women is because the recognition of being desired by smart and beautiful women the acknowledgement from my male peers made me feel important, special, needed, worthy. Even being in a committed relationship, staying in it despite all of the drama and suffering, and desiring to get back together after it was over, was more of the same. Man that was exhausting! Now I can finally delete those annoying dating apps. If I meet someone that I just really enjoy spending time with that’s cool, if not, that’s cool too, it doesn’t need to affect my self-worth or happiness.” This list goes on! Your core programs rarely just affect one area of your life, and seeing how they are running you and the suffering they are causing, brings the possibility of new decisions, positive life changes, and a new way of being. And remind yourself that this healing process isn’t only benefiting you, the new energy you’ll put out will benefit all of your loved ones, and really anyone you come in contact with.
9. Gratitude: express gratitude and send love to your suffering, your program, and yourself. Acknowledge that this program served a purpose at one point in your life, which is why you created it. Perhaps it was keeping you safe and protecting you from certain emotions you weren’t equipped to handle at the time. And at a higher level, this program is serving another purpose, it gives you a renewed sense of appreciation for your greater sense of happiness and freedom, since you are now all too familiar with its opposite. It’s allowing you to savor each ounce of your natural state it comes back to you bit by bit with each program that get’s deleted, each lie that’s exposed. Without your programs this beautiful human experience of growth and development, or perhaps better-termed “undevelopment”, wouldn’t be possible. Express gratitude to your suffering, because if it wasn’t for your suffering, the programs running you and keeping you in a more limited experience of life would still be lurking in the shadows. And finally, express gratitude to yourself for having the resilience and awareness to go through this healing process.
10. Check back in: revisit the trigger, perhaps by imagining the situation again and again, or looking at a picture of the other person involved. Notice if it still causes the same amount of suffering. A good indicator of progress is when you experience a similar trigger and don’t have as strong of a reaction. If there is still a strong reaction, that’s okay, remember to be patient. These programs can take a long time to dissolve. I have core programs that have been releasing for years. There is intelligence behind it being gradual. It allows you to savor and integrate the changes you’re experiencing. It will release when the timing is right. Take it easy on yourself. When we start to see all of these programs running us there is a tendency to judge ourselves because we suddenly see all of the unconscious and often selfish ways we were operating in the world. Just remind yourself, you were always doing the best you could with the level of awareness you had at the time. Look forward to the new possibilities, not backwards to would you could or should have done differently.
11. Take new action: the next time the trigger arises do your best to recall the insights you’ve accumulated and translate that into a new action. When you begin healing a program, don’t be surprised if situations seem to continually arise that trigger that program. This doesn’t mean something is going wrong and the universe is out to get you, quite the opposite. Just as your body is always working to heal it’s individual cells. The intelligence of life is always working to heal you. Each time you’re triggered is a new opportunity to further deflate the balloon of emotional energy you’ve built up and see through the lie that’s causing you suffering. When you’ve seen through the lie deeply enough you’ll start taking new actions. Our programs are always reflected by our actions. You can have all the insights in the world, but unless your actions reflect those insights you haven’t really changed your programming. And when you finally take new action, don’t be surprised if life ups the stakes. The day after I had a deep release and decided I was going scale back my business and travel the world, I received 4 partnership offers that I had been trying to close for months all within a few hours of each other. And an ex-girlfriend who I still wasn’t over, reached out to me for the first time in a year! When you pass the white-belt test, then you move up to yellow. This like life saying, okay you’re starting to get it, but do you really get it? It’s one thing to say no to your business and ex when things aren’t looking good, but how about when things are looking up. And of course if you get drawn back in, you experience the same cycle of suffering, release more energy and gain even deeper insight until the last bit is squeezed out of that balloon. If you don’t past the test, you repeat the class and take it again. If you past the test you get a harder test. This repeats until you’ve seen through the program inside and out. You’ve seen how although it oh so enticing in the short term, in the long term it continually causes suffering, and you make a new choice. You’re now free of your program completely; you’re now a blackbelt. You’re untouchable, unshakable, unperterable. The program can throw anything at you, but you know all its tricks, and you swat them away with a laugh at its feeble and often amusing attempts. Enjoy being a blackbelt, enjoy the renewed sense freedom, the next program is coming up soon and it doesn’t care about your karate skills, it plays chess!
12. Teach and help: guide others who are working on releasing a similar program. Don’t be surprised if after you’ve made some progress on releasing your program, and friend comes a long who is doing the same. This allows you to process, integrate, and transmute your healing into wisdom and to experience the fruits of this wisdom through the joy of helping others. Be very mindful of your true motivations at this stage, as teaching and supporting can easily become another unconscious way of seeking recognition. This something I spent a lot of time reflecting on before I started this blog!
Proactively Trigger Yourself
You also don’t have to wait for external triggers, try proactive triggering. You can bring up memories from the past, pictures, videos, recordings, old text messages, or even imagine fictional scenarios to proactively trigger yourself. This is an incredible method because you bypass one of the most difficult gatekeepers; your IF suffering THEN run like hell program, you can ensure you’re in an ideal physical space, and you can choose a time when you’re in the right mental space. If you do this regularly you’ll likely find that life won’t throw you as many curve balls because you’re healing on your own. And most importantly you’re giving an incredible gift to those around you by healing without throwing up your repressed emotions all over them. Thanks hunny bun!
Use Your Intuition
If you feel stuck at any point in this process just hold the question, “How can I release this?” and allow ideas to come. You may end up with completely new healing techniques! The process above is just what I’ve found works for me, you’ll find what works for you. The important thing is that you’re stepping into the empowerment of a self-healing mindset. From a young age we’ve been trained to always look outside ourselves for the answers. If you’re sick go this doctor and take that pill, if you’re unhappy go to talk to that psychiatrist and take that pill. And I’m not saying that working or learning from professional practitioners is bad idea. But a large part of what creates suffering is not just the mental or physical pain, it’s the sense of helplessness. The perception that this is happening to me, it means something is wrong, and there’s nothing I can do about it. The new paradigm is being created by me, it’s here to show me something to that will help me grow, and I can heal it. With practice, you start to see results, and as your confidence builds your suffering diminishes because you know why it’s here and you know you can handle it.
See The Big Picture
When you know you can handle suffering when it comes up in opens new doors to see it from an entirely new perspective. Instead a burden, the sour taste in life reluctantly endure for the sweet, it becomes material for your investigation. Grist for the mill of growth, insight, and wisdom. Your suffering is bigger than you, it’s the fire that fuels the evolutionary process of life. We don’t change on our own, we adapt to change. As Newton’s First Law of Motion states,
“A body at rest will remain at rest, and a body in motion will remain in motion unless it is acted upon by an external force. This simply means that things cannot start, stop, or change direction all by themselves. It takes some force acting on them from the outside to cause such a change. This property of massive bodies to resist changes in their state of motion is sometimes called inertia.”
https://www.livescience.com/46558-laws-of-motion.html
In this case, the force is pain, the motion is evolution, and the inertia is programs. So when you’re experiencing suffering it’s really a call to play your part in the evolution of humanity into a new level of consciousness.
Finally, wherever you’re at, whatever you’re going through, someone has been there, done that, and come out on the other side. Whether you know them personally or not, those people are always sending you their courage and wisdom.
Hope this post helps empower your healing process! As always, wishing you lots of courage, wisdom, clarity, love, and healing on your journey!
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