What Can I Do About Painful Feelings?

Painful feelings are going to arise. You can’t stop them. But that doesn’t mean you have to suffer about them. How does this work?

Let’s say a feeling arises and it’s an uncomfortable one, an anxiety about something you think you want or need in your life. It’s very intense and painful when it arises, because you really believe you need this thing to happen. Even though you know “everything is as it should be in the universe,” you can’t shake the thought that your life needs this one additional fix or you’re just never going to be able to let it go, and your life will be misery, lacking the most important elements. So obviously, it seems, the only way to make your anxiety go away is to act on this painful longing, to try and attain what is desired, to obsess enough that you find a plan that will accomplish your goal of having this thing that you want.

And so you fixate on wanting to fix the life, to have the thing that you are anxiously longing for. It’s a horrible feeling, and you want the horrible feeling to go away. It might be useful in this moment to remind yourself how these things have worked out for you in the past.

When you have achieved the desired thing, did it relieve that anxiety? Probably. Did it feel good? Yes. For how long? How long before some other anxiety became just as intense, or before the thing you longed for turned out to be disappointing, or at least not the be-all-and-end-all that you thought it was going to be? (Yes, even “being enlightened” is going to disappoint, because it’s a false goal.) Or, if the desire never was met, how long before you forgot all about that desire? How many things have you probably had desire about in your life that you don’t even remember now? Hundreds. Thousands.

So in the throes of anxiety about something you want, you remember that it doesn’t need to be acted on. The bringing about of a desired outcome is not the point. The point is, there is anxiety now. There is a terrible discomfort, a fear mixed with longing, a terror of things not going right. That’s what you really want to change – the current feeling. And your fantasies of fixing the life just seem to make it worse. Around and around in obsessive circles about what you need to do, thinking this obsessing is the only way to rid yourself of this terror that has arisen.

So then what can you do?

The key is knowing that no feeling needs to be acted on. It’s going to go away by itself. Knowing there is nothing to fix, nothing to do, just watch. Just watch this feeling of anxiety arise, and notice that it is clearly seen in consciousness, and know that it will pass. The pain is in thinking that you have to act on it. The pain gets worse by your thinking you have to make it go away by acting on it, by your being responsible for doing all the necessary things to bring about the perfect circumstances for the anxiety to go away. And the silly thing is, the anxiety is going to go away by itself. Just watch, as it fades and is replaced by another thought. It may take a while, and it may ache while it’s here, but it will go away.

So it is important to see when an uncomfortable feeling is here, that it will simply pass, that’s all. But while it is here, you just watch in amazement at how clear it is. There is a clear light of consciousness which shines on that feeling, and you see it with compassion, without wanting to do anything about it. There is no reason at all that anything has to be done to alleviate anxiety or any other uncomfortable feeling. It does not need to be acted on. No action has any satisfactory effect. And if it doesn’t need to be acted on, then it can be forgotten. It passes, and that’s that.

Remember that you are the clear light of consciousness which shines on all the feelings and thoughts that arise. There is no one residing in those thoughts and feelings! There is no one home in that story! Feelings come and go; they are attached to, but they need not be. Above all, none of the nonsense that arises needs to be acted on. There is no one there for any action to affect! The only “one” in the universe is already all taken care of for all eternity, and that “one” is you, the light of consciousness itself.