Breaking the Addiction to Suffering

We say we want inner peace. We tell anyone who will listen that our deepest wish is for happiness and contentment, and that we would be willing to do anything to have it. And in the next moment we can find ourselves engaging in activities and thinking thoughts that create just the opposite; non-peace, unhappiness and confusion, and the suffering that goes with them. Sometimes it can seem like, despite how much we may wish to be free and unbound, we easily get swept along in a current of thought and emotion that leads, again and again, to exactly the opposite of what we say we want in our lives.

If we are honest, it can almost seem that we are addicted to the thoughts and feelings that bring suffering and heaviness to our lives; that no matter our well meaning intention's, we continue to go back to the very thoughts and actions that create such suffering and burden in our lives. The way out of this dilemma is to see clearly that, on some level, we are completely addicted to these negative states, and to simply be honest about it. Seeing this attachment to our heavy thoughts and feelings, we bring them gently into our awareness with complete acceptance of ourselves as we are.

In this awareness, we simply allow and watch the mind go about it's frantic dance of addictive suffering and keep our awareness as the one who is watching the play unfold; the big space of unattached awareness in which everything comes and goes, including the thoughts and feelings that arise. With commitment and dedication, we will begin to find ourselves becoming free of the impulsive thoughts that create so much misery in our lives, and living from the wide-open, sky-like awareness that is at the core of who and what we truly are.