Hi everyone,
Welcome to Spiritual Sobriety.
I'm your host,
Chris McDuffie.
For today's discussion,
We will continue to look at how we cause our own suffering and how to free ourselves in order to create joy and happiness.
I welcome all of our new listeners and followers as we begin our third week of Spiritual Sobriety.
It's very exciting to see our growing fellowship of followers from all around the world.
I really enjoy reading your comments and feedbacks after each podcast.
During last week's podcast,
We considered how to balance our suffering by honoring our suffering and including the macro perspective of gratitude.
We practiced generating joy and love and compassion by creating a gratitude list.
We also contemplated our feelings associated with the people,
Places,
And things that we are grateful for having in our lives and that which sobriety affords us.
We also saw that for us in recovery,
Practicing acts of gratitude is a powerful coping skill for managing our emotions and a powerful relapse prevention skill.
Let's begin today's discussion with a new contemplative exercise.
You will need some paper and a pen.
You may wish to devote a notebook to the Spiritual Sobriety podcast so you may reflect on our discussions and note the resources that I suggest you explore.
You will want to find Andrew Olensky's article entitled Pleasure and Pain published in the journal Tricycle the Buddhist Review and Judy Leaf's August 2016 article entitled The Middle Way of Stress published in the Buddhist journal Lion's Roar.
These are two wonderful journals that you may wish to follow to enhance your learning of Buddhism.
The Buddha reported that he saw all of life's 10,
000 joys and 10,
000 sorrows while becoming enlightened to the causes of human suffering.
Yep,
He enumerated each one and you will notice that they are equally balanced.
For every thought and feeling of joy,
There is an equal opposite feeling of sorrow.
Buddha taught using dialectics as a means of instruction.
Dialectical contemplation may be defined as inquiry into metaphysical contradictions and their solutions.
I'd invite you to begin today's contemplative exercise by writing the following terms on either side of your page as opposites to one another.
Happiness versus suffering,
Fame versus insignificance,
Praise versus blame,
Gain versus loss.
I'll repeat those for you again on the same side of paper we now have happiness versus suffering,
Fame versus insignificance,
Praise versus blame,
And gain versus loss.
Next I invite you to read each term intently and contemplate on each for a few minutes noticing and feeling the sense feelings that arise within you.
Please write down the feelings that arose under each term.
You may want to pause the podcast and rejoin us in five minutes.
Okay,
Welcome back.
You may have noticed that the left column probably felt more comfortable and pleasurable than the right.
If that was the case,
Consider for a moment why this happened.
After all,
These are just words on a piece of paper,
Right?
It is our egoic thinking mind fed by our fear,
Our experiences,
Our trauma,
And many other factors that generate millions of thoughts and then feelings as we perceive every situation.
You might say then that every perception of every situation throughout each day will generate emotions that fall into any one of these eight feelings that we have just been contemplating.
Buddha called this collection of the eight dialectics of human emotions the eight worldly preoccupations.
How might our addictions and our attachments and our unskillful reaction to these perceptions feed our suffering?
Did we think that we could or should avoid the uncomfortable and live only in the comfortable?
Do you see clearly Buddha's suggestion that our suffering is sourced from our attachments or grabbings and the dialectical opposite of aversions?
Buddha discusses the concept of suffering more in his Sutra,
The Arrow.
I'd like to go back to your paper for a few seconds to contemplate on another exercise.
Take a few minutes to consider and note under each term specific examples in your past or the present moment.
Notice too the thoughts and sense feelings that arise as you consider each feeling on your sheet.
You may want to pause the podcast again and rejoin us in five minutes.
Okay welcome back again.
If any very uncomfortable feelings should arise please seek immediate help and support for medical professionals.
Our practices and exercises are not meant to feel punitive or life-threatening.
You may wish to pause the podcast again to contemplate some more.
Okay welcome back again.
Consider again the mind and the heart's desire to grab onto or push away certain feelings from today's exercise.
You are practicing how to make wise minded safe responses that are loving and kind to yourself and others.
You may wish to bring today's insight to your sponsor,
Your therapist,
Or your spiritual mentor.
In the Sutra,
The Arrow,
Buddha describes for us the self-inflicting wounds that causes our suffering.
Consider a client whose wife divorced him in sobriety.
The first arrow is the pain and suffering that he feels as a result of these attachments.
Those attachments might be certainty,
I will always have a wife,
Loyalty,
She will always be at my side,
And image,
Look at me I am somebody special with this beautiful wife next to me.
Now imagine this client relapsing over the real suffering that he feels.
This Buddha suggests is the second arrow.
He now has arrows in him not just one.
In the 12-step program we are encouraged in step three to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.
I choose to see God as a loving kind God of love or simply love.
Step three reminds us not to harm ourselves with a second arrow after we have already turned away from love and have already created suffering through our fear and our small sense of self which we blame others for creating.
Dr.
Jason Kim writes in his January 2015 article in Parallax Press entitled Releasing the Arrow which he uses an excerpt from Thich Nhat Hanh's book No Mud No Lotus quote the unwelcome things that sometimes happen in life like being rejected,
Losing an object,
Failing a test,
Getting injured in an accident are analogous to the first arrow.
They cause some pain.
The second arrow fired by our own selves is our reaction,
Our own storyline,
And our own anxiety.
All these things magnify the suffering.
Many times the ultimate disasters we're ruminating upon hasn't even happened.
So how have you responded to situations that you deem painful?
Steps one through nine help us form a non judging,
Non punitive lens to look at how we can respond to our situations with love and kindness to ourselves and others in the future.
I hope that you found today's discussion on feelings and emotions very informative and helpful as you practice ending your suffering.
Please click follow Spiritual Supriety so that you will automatically receive each week's new podcasts.
I look forward to reading your thoughts,
Comments and questions.
Thanks.
