The truth is, life is uncomfortable. Maybe not all the time, but for some, it's constant. The paradox is life is filled with beauty, joy and pain. It is everything all together, all at once.
Author and teacher Gangaji has studied and practiced meditation, healing, and spiritual practice for decades. After many years, she realized she still felt discomfort, like something was unfinished and her search for truth remained. This was a surprise, that it didn't go away. “I wanted the uncomfortable feeling in my chest to be cured by all that I knew and practiced.”
Finally, after opening to what she calls the most naked truth, she says, “...I was aware of longing for what I could not even name.” She writes in Hidden Treasure that she eventually found a place of fulfillment and stillness that endures by accepting with certainty “that who I am includes all,” so that the states of her experience, negative and positive, grief and joy, no longer dislodge this awareness.
Gangaji found freedom in surrender, accepting the full spectrum of the experience without attaching to one state or another. She is not her grief; she is not her joy. She's all of it (and some might say, none of it) all at the same time.
We naturally want to attach to positive emotional states, the things we like and want like love and contentment, and push away what we don't like. But when we resist negative states, it creates a great deal of suffering and confusion. The chase is on—running away from the bad stuff and always in search of the good. When this is the life, when do we arrive? Is it possible to live happy, peaceful and fulfilled lives in a state of half resistance, half acceptance?
Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh offers another way to think about this. He says, “We don't have to destroy suffering in order to have happiness.”
In other words, acknowledging suffering doesn't require seeing everything as suffering or identifying with it. It also means we don't run from it and we take steps to transform it. Only by acknowledging suffering, not resisting it, may it be transformed.