We’ve been trained to believe that our problems—our problems and their resulting pain, that is—come back to us again and again and again because we are lazy, or we’re in a karmic bond that we best not fuck with, or perhaps simply because we are mostly good people who happen to be fucked up when it comes to a certain aspect of life—money, relationships, health, work, etc.

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When all else fails, there’s always Eve to blame—goddammit, Eve! You and your penchant for apples!

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When things get really dark, it can even legit get to feeling as though perhaps we are cursed. Doomed by destiny or our parents or some past life or God to fail and be unhappy in certain ways no matter how hard we try.

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What I teach is that all of this is bullshit.

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Well-meaning bullshit much of the time, but hooey nonetheless.

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***

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Our problems—our problems and their resulting pain, that is—come back to us again and again and again for one reason, and it is the sweetest reason you could ever imagine.

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Our problems come to us repeatedly because they want to be seen.

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They don’t want us to fix them. They want us to see them.

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Normally, what something upsetting happens, we feel pain, and we get to doin’ shit to solve the problem that caused the pain.

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But if we will instead Stop.

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And pause…

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And see, or be with, our pain: then it will transmute.

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Our greatest power is in our being, our beingness—hence our being named “human beings.”

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And so, when we be with our pain, then it can take its conscious form: our salvation.

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***

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The space between solving and seeing is infinitesimally tiny.

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And yet, the tiny turn toward seeing makes all the difference.

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It is the difference between the experience of suffering and the experience of liberation.

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99.99 percent of the time, we miss this turn, and thus, we suffer—and we miss our liberation: our divine capacity to feel good here and now. What I call pleasure.

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But each time we are very brave and very daring and look at our pain instead of solve it: Ohhh, then we can know so much pleasure.

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For it turns out: It’s all pleasure.

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And that is the gospel: that all is pleasure.

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The implications of this gospel are staggering! For it means that we don’t have to be afraid anymore of life. Instead, we can see that life actually is working with us, or is trying to, all the time. We can see that life loves us and wants only to bless us all the time.

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What we get to see when we practice is that it’s all just been a misunderstanding and a misinterpretation of epic fucking proportions. But we are welcomed to return in every right now to the flow of life.

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As big as all this is, it takes only about 15 minutes to experience this phenomenon. And it heals everything.

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There’s lots more I could say right now, but I don’t need to because I’m saying it here.

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Further reading about the polarities of pleasure: High Pleasure and Deep Pleasure.

 

Think of them as yin and yang, PB&J, Fruit Loops with cold milk: we gotta have both for our joy and well-being. 

 

'Cause Fruit Loops without the milk is unacceptable. 

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