The Fear of Suffering Causes Suffering

I hope you all had a great week. The universe is always sending us messages…. often right when we need them. However, we have to be paying attention in order to receive them. That is the power of mindfulness. So, when I saw this little parable in my inbox from a friend last week I am happy I “received it”.
 

“My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer,” the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky. The alchemist answered, “Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself.” 

When I read it, it resonated and became my message for my classes because I have been finding myself worrying a bit about the “what ifs” in the future. And I noticed that those worries very quickly had become a habit that was quite ingrained in my thought pattern and was causing me extra suffering.

Often the worries we hold on to do not come to fruition and the challenges we experience are things we didn’t expect. The habitual worries take us out of the joy in the present and put us in the uncertainty of the future which causes quite a bit of extra suffering. 

The universe is kind and offers us many chances to practice the same message (because we get better with practice) and I noticed the opportunity to remind myself of this parable many times last week as my family navigated through some upsetting surprises. It is often the case that the anticipation is worse than the reality and yet again that was true. We are adaptable, resilient creatures if we allow ourselves to be… both on the mat and off.

I literally imagined that process and the frame I saw was of me finishing the run. “Changing the frame” is one way to activate our mindfulness super power.  Patanjali says it another way in his Sutras. “When disturbed by negative thoughts, opposite ones should be thought of.”

My mindfulness practice helped me see that the habitual thoughts were taking over, that it was a story that wasn’t true. I “changed the frame”, kept running right past the gym and made it all the way home. The more we practice, the better we get…. at running and at mindfulness. 
 
See below for my teaching schedule. Again I will not be teaching this Friday as I am dropping my daughter back at college but I will be teaching Tuesday and 2 classes on Wednesday.