Hi wildoceanflower,

Like Anita, I am glad to see you posting here again 🙂 Thank you for acknowledging my reply to you and I am grateful for this space too. Thanks for sharing your experiences and giving us the privilege to have a look into your inside world.

I also wanted to affirm your growth with this line: “I kept my reply to the point of returning his things, no other information..and that hurt because i wanted to say more.”  While it hurt that you wanted to say more but held yourself back, it seems to me that you grew in the sense that you did not reach out to the person that hurt you and expect him to soothe your hurt. I am not sure what held you back, but I thought maybe on some level, you know that you cannot rely on him to soothe your hurt.

It sounds to me that being in pain is your comfort zone and you are so accustomed to feeling pain that you feel this is where you belong. Pain is so familiar to you that it is so comfortable. And that is why you have made so much room for misery in your life because you know how it feels. Sometimes as much as these feelings do not serve us in our life, we let it remain because it is comfortable. We do not know what is life like without these familiar feelings and we fear it.

And then this line of yours jumped out at me: “And a fear of having it (joy)…in case it goes away.”  And this fear of reaching out for joy would keep you further trapped in the pain that you feel. I used to have this fear like yours too. When I lost my mother to cancer, I did not want to get close to anyone again. I thought of how if there were more people I loved, I would have to go through more losses and pain in future when they die.

However, I also realised that impermanence is the way of life. Nothing lasts forever. Joy does not last forever and similarly pain does not last forever. While joy does not last forever, I try to immerse myself with each experience of joy. I know fully that the joy would not last and thus when it leaves, I just acknowledge that it is a part of life and try not cling on to it so tightly. Sometimes accepting that this is a harsh reality of life just makes it less tiring. It feels more like I am going with the flow of life rather than against it. I am not struggling with life but working with life. And rather than focusing on how I may lose them, I stay present and treasure each experience of joy I have.

If you look at the world around you, everything goes through a cycle. Flowers bloom and flowers wilt and when the season comes again, they will bloom once more. The sun rises and the sun sets on its cycle. As much as we wish for flowers to bloom forever, they wont. And that is also when we appreciate the blooms more because we know it will not last forever.

And like what Anita says, it seems like your core beliefs keeps you in pain too. And then you justify why you should be in pain (cosmic punishment, karma etc) and probably these justifications fit in with your narrative of why you should be in pain and keeps you comfortable in pain. I agree with Anita that you deserve to be happy. And the core beliefs/narratives can be changed one step at a time.

And while maybe there are some cosmic forces at work like you believe in, we can also make room for other moments within the situation.

So wildoceanflower, what would life look like if you were not in this familiar pain but in fleeting moments of happiness?