Wanting to feel better is natural and healthy. It’s built into us through the generations, and it’s a form of self-care and kindness to ourselves and those around us.
Compulsively wanting to feel better is a bit different. That’s a way to avoid something. It’s a way to avoid our current experience. To avoid feeling certain uncomfortable feelings and looking at the scary thoughts connected to them.
When we compulsively seek healing and awakening in order to avoid our current experience, it adds another layer of suffering. Compulsively seeking to escape is inherently uncomfortable.
So we can welcome this compulsion and explore it with gentle curiosity. We can meet it with kindness and see how our mind creates this compulsion to avoid our current experience. And that allows the compulsion and the charge in it to relax.
What’s left is still a natural wish for healing and feeling better. And we know that a component of that is to welcome and rest with our current experience as it is. And that includes welcoming and resting with any wish for our current experience to be different.
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Initial notes…..
- wanting to feel better, while addressing the compulsion to feel better
- wanting to feel better is natural and healthy
- compulsively wanting to feel better is a way of avoiding something, and it’s good to look at (will reduce overall suffering)
- want to avoid feeling something and associated scary thoughts
- the compulsion in itself is suffering, another layer of suffering
- welcoming the compulsion, gently exploring it to see what’s there
- allows it to relax, relax the charge in it
- allows us to befriend our current experience, whatever it is (makes it easier)
- wish to feel better, while also looking at that wish
- wish to feel better is natural, healthy
- if compulsive, then adds another layer to the suffering, so good to look at the compulsion aspect of it
- compulsively wanting our experience to change comes from a wish to avoid, not feel it, and is its own suffering
- can rest with it, gently explore it, and it may relax
- no need to add yet another layer of discomfort by telling ourselves we shouldn’t want to feel better, because it’s natural and healthy, all we need is to welcome that impulse in us allowing it to relax
Initial draft….
Wanting to feel better is natural and healthy. It’s built into us through the generations, and it’s a form of self-care and kindness to ourselves and those around us.
Compulsively wanting to feel better is a bit different. That’s a way to avoid something. It’s a way to avoid feeling certain uncomfortable feelings and looking at the scary thoughts connected to them.
We can compulsively seek healing and awakening in order to avoid feeling and looking at something. And that’s just another layer of suffering. Compulsively seeking to escape is inherently uncomfortable.
So we can welcome this compulsion and explore it with gentle curiosity. We can meet it with kindness and see how our mind creates this compulsion to avoid our current experience. And that can allow the compulsion to relax. It allows the charge in it to relax.
What’s left is still a natural wish for healing and feeling better. And we know that a component of that is to welcome and rest with our current experience as it is. And that includes welcoming and resting with any wish for our current experience to be different.