If the sun didn’t shine on the
earth then the other side of the world wouldn’t have night. Think how many
wonderful things there are in the darkness of night…? There are nocturnal
animals and stars, city lights and cool air; the moon reflected in still ponds
and nightingale’s song, there is rest and sleep and dreams. Imagine freshly
fallen raindrops hanging from the tip of every leaf of a tree and in every drop
is the reflection of the moon. Without the dark of night we wouldn’t have many
wonderful and beautiful things. The night also is full of shadows and lurking
fears, of things that can’t be seen, of howling wolves and spider webs, slimy
slugs and shrieking bats.
Life is made up of experiences,
some that make us feel glad and others that make us feel bad. Sometimes something
happens in life that feels so bad it feels like your heart is going to crack
and your body wants to die. But guess what? If you can teach your mind to look
at negative experiences in the right way you will not only get over them but
they will make you a stronger and better person.
We all have bad experiences in
life but we can use them as a catalyst to change life into something brighter.
Start small, in the midst of a calamity, find a tiny thing of beauty, a
butterfly or an interesting leaf, a sunny sky and puffy clouds, the sound of
rain or someone’s smile. Let it bring you into the moment, each moment is
easier to deal with than the stories created in your mind of what might be or
what may have happened.
In a dark room if you turn on a light the
darkness is gone and the room is filled with light, if it wasn’t dark in the
first place you would have no need to turn on a light because you would already
be able to see. If we didn’t have dark times in our lives, we wouldn’t
recognize the bright times. There is a comparison for us in experiences that
cause us pain with experiences that bring us happiness. Search for the positive
in the negative experience then the negative experience can have a positive reaction.
If you can learn a positive lesson from a negative experience then the negative
experience isn’t really negative at all, it’s positive because it has taught
you a valuable lesson. If you don’t learn from a negative experience, if you
can’t find some positive reason for its happening, then it can only remain
negative, you won’t grow or learn and will probably repeat the same mistake
over again till you eventually learn, if you never learn you will stay on the
treadmill of negative existence.
Don’t try to deny hurt and pain,
pushing it away will only make it stronger. We naturally gravitate to what
makes us feel good and repel what makes us feel bad. Try the opposite, embrace it. It isn’t a good
idea to smack a crying child in an effort to sooth them, you would cuddle them,
nurture them, say comforting things. That is what you need to do to feelings
that make you feel bad. Say a loved one has died and you are feeling grief,
loss and sadness. These emotions don’t make you feel good and it seems that the
natural thing to do is to try and push them away or block them out because you
don’t like feeling bad. Instead of looking at the event and thinking about the
loved one, look at how you are feeling, look at your grief. By looking at the
emotion objectively it looses its power and fades away. It takes practice. Look
at the emotion, not the event that has caused the pain. It is natural to feel
pain and grief, so embrace it, notice the feeling and be kind to it, be kind to
yourself. You can try imagining the
feeling as an object or a colour or as a bubble with the feeling inside, look
at it. Say to yourself that it is ok to feel this way, accept the emotion, don’t
try to stifle it, just let it be. After a little while, tell the feeling that you
acknowledge its existence, put it in a container, a bubble, a box, whatever you
visualize and put it away till later. Next time the feeling rises, bring it out
of its container, look at it, acknowledge that it is there, accept it and put
it away again. If you have made the emotion into a colour, change the colour.
You don’t need to hold onto emotions that hurt, you don’t
need to push them away; you just need to accept them.
What if you are in a bad situation? Is there anything you
can do to change the situation? If there is then do it! Do whatever you can to
fix it. If there is nothing you can do, there is no use worrying about it,
worrying and obsessing over it isn’t going to change the problem nor is it
going to provide a solution, it is only going to cause you the grief of
worrying, there is no point, so stop worrying about it. If you are worried
about something that might happen in the future, there is no point as we can’t
know what the future may bring, circumstances may change and bring a favourable
outcome and then you will have wasted all that time and energy worrying about
nothing. If you do everything in your power to fix a situation and things don’t
work out the way you envisaged, then they probably weren’t meant to, but you
will have the knowledge that you have done your best, that you took action
instead of wasting energy on pointless worry, accept that the universe has made
life this way for reasons you may not understand, you have to trust that the
universe works the way it does for a reason. It’s really strange, but once you
stop fighting against the tide and go with the flow, things have a way of
working out for the best, differently to what you hopes, but ultimately for the
good. It takes trust and faith.
Turn the light on in the darkness of your mind. Turn
suffering into happiness, embrace the suffering, look at it, learn from it, and
transform it into something positive. Without negative experiences we wouldn’t
have the catalyst or the opportunity for the growth it offers, so they aren’t
really negative at all, they are positive means for us to grow into happy
light-filled life participants. Look at
life’s experiences this way and everything you thought was bad in your life
turns into something good, negative is transformed into positive.
You can’t be enlightened if you haven’t been endarkened.
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