I used to think that suffering was showing me I had it wrong.I thought that if I felt badly around my partner, my feelings were showing me that I was in the wrong relationship.
If I woke up feeling badly, I wracked my brain for a cause. Is someone upset with me? Is there a missed appointment or unpaid bill somewhere? Is there a repressed memory coming up that I need to investigate?
With an eating disorder, uncomfortable feelings looked like evidence that I truly shouldn’t have taken that extra serving, or that I really did need to lose more weight. With anxiety, suffering looked like proof that life wasn’t safe and I wasn’t sane.
I knew feelings were providing valuable information—the trick was decoding that information so I could use to it my benefit. Every uncomfortable feeling led me on a wild goose chase to fix something in the world or in myself.
I had it backwards the whole time.
Uncomfortable feelings weren’t alerting me to a real problem I needed to solve. They were showing where my mind was; that my mind was thinking up stuff and I was treating those thoughts as true, objective reality.
Feelings can’t tell us what’s happening out in the world, but they do even better. They show us when we’re confusing impermanent thought with the world “out there”.
