WHAT IS OUR BIGGEST STRESS?
The biggest stresses on human beings are emotional ones and the biggest stress of all is trying to be who you are not. There’s always stress in moving towards authenticity because we have been taught since children to be afraid of our authentic selves because if we are our authentic selves we are going to lose the world.
That’s the fear, because we already are authentic, we can’t not be authentic, you are just not in touch with it, and we all have these defences and all this mechanism with which you keep from being authentic-like being nice all the time. Say why am I like that? That’s not a question, that’s a statement, I already know I am like that because I am not good enough, but if you ask it compassionately with curiosity, then you might be able to come up with the answer. (I have always been a people pleaser accommodating other people’s views so as to avoid conflict)
So I suggest that every time that question comes up for you ask it with that compassion and curiosity rather than a self accusation, then the answer will come to you. Because if I attack you, what are you going to do, you are going to defend yourself, but if I treat you with compassion you are going to open up. There is a spiritual teacher who says that only when compassion is present will people allow themselves to see the truth, so if you want to see the truth you need to be compassionate with yourself, so that’s the first point. (I think my people pleasing comes from not wanting to feel uncomfortable by disagreeing with the other. My Counsellor recently advised me to start “getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.” Perhaps this is the price we need to pay for being ourselves. What do you think?)
CHANGE DOES NOT HAPPEN OVERNIGHT
The second point is, this is new territory for you, there’s stuff you still have to learn, Now the Buddha who was one of the great teachers of all time of course, he had this image of two strong men pulling a third one, a weaker one towards the precipice, and they are going to throw him off into the abyss, and this poor weaker guy digs his heals into the ground and he tries to resist but they are stronger than he is, and the Buddha said that those two strong men are what he called our habit energies, the things that we have been habituated into doing all our lives. They are just ingrained in our brains like fixed patterns, and the weaker guy says is our untrained mind. So if we want to overcome our habit energies.
Now for you to suppress yourself in the presence of some people is just a habit like you learned very early in life, before you had any choice in the matter, its ingrained in your brain. There are brain circuits who are telling you that if I am authentic that’s not good. Those are your habit energies, so that’s an automatic behaviour for you, and that automatic behaviour is there despite what you know intellectually, despite what you’ve learned so those habit energies in certain situations will get triggered unless you train yourself very patiently and you wouldn’t expect to go into a gym and press150 lbs on the first day, you are going to press maybe 25 lbs.
So right now you are pressing maybe 75 lbs, you want to press 150 lbs you have to train yourself some more to overcome those habit energies. (Another price we need to pay perhaps in becoming our authentic selves. Our adaptive patterns I think in a sense have become our comfort zone and it will take effort to re-program ourselves back to who we really are by learning to become aware of and to know how to appropriately express our feelings.)
