At the beginning of each Crossroads Renewal I ask a question that often gives pause for thought: what brings you joy and contentment? Some say, “I haven’t experienced joy for so long that I’ve forgotten what that experience feels like” or “I don’t know that I’ve ever felt contentment” I’ve even heard comments like, “I don’t deserve joy in my life” or “I came to Crossroads to get sober. Now I’m sober but I’m miserable or Why are you asking me about joy?” So, what’s the reason I ask this question?
Joy is our birthright. It’s our natural state of being. When we experience disconnection, either from our own souls or from others in our life we become distracted and pulled away from our innate capability to experience this state of being. But what is joy and how do we attain it?
Dr Abraham Twerski describes joy as “genuine flourishing” — not a pleasurable sensation or mood but a way of being in the world that can encompass the fullness of human experience, joy and pleasure as well as suffering and loss.
Why would the experience of “flourishing” encompass both pleasure and suffering? It seems paradoxical that the journey toward contentment could start by giving ourselves permission not to be content. We don’t change our state by resisting or running away from it any more than we get rid of unfulfilled desires just by telling ourselves to give them up. To move on, we must first let ourselves be fully where we are in this moment—even if where we are is frustrated, out of sorts, insecure, scared, and full of dissatisfaction, thwarted ambition, or anxiety.
Usually, most people are afraid to do this, imagining that they’ll end up wallowing in misery. But accepting your situation is very different from giving into self-pity. Unlike wallowing, this inner acceptance lets you relax the inner muscle that keeps trying to control the uncontrollable, and frees you from the terrible stress of feeling that you have to pretend everything is OK when you know it isn’t.
Feelings of dissatisfaction, no matter how much we’d like to lose them, should not be dismissed lightly. Any feeling of discontent contains a message, a built-in wake-up call. When we feel truly discontent, it’s almost always because we’re either out of touch with our most authentic self or with the desires that come from our heart’s core. To achieve lasting contentment, we must be willing to examine our own feelings of dissatisfaction, to trace them to their source.
Unfortunately, most of us have learned three typical responses when we experience pain or discontent. The first response involves numbing ourselves through addiction or dissociation. The second response is becoming aggressive with ourselves in the form of self-harm and self-deprecation. Or, we become emotionally or physically aggressive with others. Thirdly, we desperately seek pleasure or comfort through food, sex, love or other compulsive behaviors. All these are temporary and destructive remedies that choke the life out of us.
There’s always an urge to medicate ourselves when we experience pain. The problem is that whatever form of self-medication we’ve chosen becomes habitual until we completely lose sight of who we are and wind up doing a performance of living.
Pema Chodron, the Buddhist monk uses the analogy that we’re all like children who have a chronic case of scabies. We’re old enough to scratch, but not wise enough to know that when we scratch the sores, it spreads and gets worse. In other words, we have all have discomfort: the itch. And when we scratch we get very temporary symptom relief. It spreads and soon we’re scratching over our whole body and we’re suffering.
In this analogy, we go to a doctor who gives us an option. The healing solution is to stay with the itch, the discomfort, practice healthy self- soothing, journal, talk to our sponsor, meditate or pray. Don’t deny the pain is there, but resist the urge to scratch the itch by turning to self-sabotage.
And, if we learn to love ourselves enough, we’ll stop the short-term symptom relief and stay in the present. We’ll go through the fear and we’ll stop allowing our lives to be dictated by our discomfort and reach for other ways of making ourselves content without burying the discomfort and continuing the suffering. It’s a transformative balance between acknowledging the discontent and yet taking life-giving steps towards healing.
Most of us are looking for a quick fix that doesn’t exist. It takes practice, patience and persistence. For most of us it’s a process of five steps forward, three steps back and no one does this perfectly.
But if you begin to accept both discomfort and joy, you’ll begin to value the preciousness of your whole life with it’s rough and smooth.
Start today to see how you “scratch the itch” and practice the willingness to stay instead of run away, if you aspire to work that way, your life will be gradually transformed.
Rokelle Lerner Senior Clinical Advisor, Crossroads Centre Antigua
Carol Scillia says:
Thank you Rokelle for your article. Your message fits perfectly with what I have used to keep myself in check, disciplined, and present. M.Scott Peck’s book “The Road Less Traveled” was a turning point. I regularly read the first three or four pages. I believe the first paragraph alone is a prolific summation of how I struggled.
“Life is Difficult.
This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult—once we truly understand and accept it—then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters. Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly…about the enormity of their problems..and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as life SHOULD be easy.” M. Scott Peck