Creative Guidance – Accepting Pain & Pleasure – Inspirational Educative Articles

Accepting Pain & Pleasure:

As impossible it is to eradicate pain and suffering from your life fully, that impossible it is to be happy all the time. Happiness is like a tickling sensation of the mind – It is good and enjoyable in short bursts, but becomes irritating if it is continuous. Somehow, we have built our society around the assumption that happiness is our highest goal and purpose of life. This wrong assumption is the single biggest reason why we are unhappy. We have assumed that happiness solves all our problems and that is all what we are searching for.

Happiness and misery are the two legs of an individual. You need both to walk. If you choose happiness and reject misery, you will be limping all the time, and it will not look good. If you are obsessed about being happy all the time, that itself is enough to make you unhappy. If you decide that you want to be happy for one whole day, your mind will give you enough reasons to be unhappy. If you want to be miserable, then make happiness your highest goal.

If happiness is the only objective, then what about those moments when you are experiencing pain and suffering? For example, what happens when you hit your toe to the chair leg? What happens when your favorite team loses the game? What happens when you genuinely have to be sad? In all these moment you go into an internal conflict because you have rejected all other emotions and you only want to be happy. This by itself is enough to cause a lot of suffering.

Accepting all emotions of life and everything life can throw at you with equal-mindedness is the whole essence of being alive in the moment. Being alive in the moment is not to choose between happiness and sadness. If there is happiness, experience it; laugh and rejoice in that happiness. If there is pain and suffering, suffer in that suffering. Both pain and pleasure complement the way of life. You have to accept both equally to be able to experience life in its completeness.

“This article is a part of the creative endeavor of Meditation Farm and IASBABA.”