The Deepest Acceptance by Jeff Foster

Author:Jeff Foster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sounds True

PAIN AND TIME

Often what appears along with physical pain is a stressful, fearful, nervous, anxious mental reaction—an avalanche of stories about what will or will not happen in the future. I experience pain (or fear or sadness or any uncomfortable feeling) right now, but I am worried about how long the pain will last, if or when it will end, how bad it will get. Will there be pain like this for the rest of my life? Will it stay like this, or will it get worse? What if it becomes unbearable? What if it ends up killing me? What if … ?

The mind always seems to make things look worse than they actually are. You’ll always find that your story about reality is much worse than reality itself. In reality, you only ever have to deal with this moment of pain. Just this moment. Just what’s happening right now. In the story, you have to deal with pain in time. In the story, you have to deal with a whole past and future of pain! You may even convince yourself that you have to deal with a lifetime of pain, which sounds too unbearable to even think about. It is, quite literally, the mind’s idea of hell. But in reality, life always spares you; it only ever gives you this moment, and you never have a direct experience of a lifetime of pain. In reality, there is no such thing as always or forever or never ending. Hell is a product of thought, nothing more.

Think about when you’re sitting in an airplane during severe turbulence. You have a big stress reaction when you begin to imagine that the turbulence might be too much for the plane and might cause it to crash. Thought is great at telling stories of a future catastrophe. But what is the reality of the situation? The plane is going through some rough air, and as a result, you are being thrown around. That is the reality—you’re being thrown around in your seat, right now. That is all that’s happening. But thought lives in time, and so it says, “Well, in this moment it’s okay, but in the next moment it won’t be okay. In this moment it’s bearable and I’m alive, but in the very next moment it will become unbearable and I will die. The turbulence is going to get worse and worse.” And in reaction to this story, a sick feeling in the stomach, shortness of breath, tightness in the chest and throat, and heart palpitations can appear. Don’t forget, the body cannot tell the difference between a real threat and an imagined threat. Great fear appears—as if things were about to get much worse. The body prepares itself for fight or flight—or in the case of an airplane crash, it prepares itself for death.

So there you are, sitting on the plane, preparing yourself for death, while the pilot very calmly flies the plane. He’s been through turbulence like this hundreds of times, and to him, it’s nothing.

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