Sticks and stones may break my bones
But words shall never hurt me.

The rhyme is used as a defense against name-calling and verbal bullying, intended to increase resiliency, avoid physical retaliation and to remain calm.
~~[Wikipedia]

Whatever we may say, unkind words or even words that were not meant unkindly, can often hurt us.

Belonging, approval, and being part of a group or tribe is important to us because it enhances our survival (it is an evolutionary drive). Therefore, we feel good when we get approval from others and feel bad when we get their disapproval. Because of survival, our minds also have a negative bias.

The negative bias is our tendency not only to register negative stimuli more readily but also to dwell on these events. … In almost any interaction, we are more likely to notice negative things and later remember them more vividly.
~~[VeryWellMind]

To quote Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, “the bad stuff is easier to believe.”

The Bad Stuff Is Easier to Believe

When we hear speech, our mind processes it and categorizes it. From this comes our own perception of what is said. Our perception of what is said is colored by our past memories, learned habits, our current mood, and more. Based on this perception, one or more emotions may arise. We may feel happy at a compliment from a respected friend, or insulted by a perceived cruel remark from a foe.

My mother once told me this – “Your father does not love you and would abandon you to get what he wants.”

Obviously, this affected me greatly and caused me great emotional pain. It caused me great pain and sorrow then, and the memory of it continues to cause me pain, even though my mother has since passed away. Why is that and is there a way to release that continued pain and suffering?

As described previously, there are many causes and conditions that contribute to the arising of an emotion. Once an emotion arises, we have an opportunity to decide on our response. We can let that emotion control our subsequent action, or we can override the prescribed action of that emotion. Our natural state is to be in automatic mode, which is to say that we keep our messy emotions suppressed so that it doesn’t rise to consciousness. In this way, we unconsciously act according to our emotions. This can lead to unwanted consequences like the continuous pain and suffering from the memory of my mother.

A careless or inaccurate statement, if left unchallenged mentally, leads to inaccurate thoughts that cause difficult emotions to arise. This further leads to more inaccurate thoughts, which later become beliefs, that then lead to more difficult emotions and so on, until it snowballs into a lifetime of hurt as well as suffering.

“Your father does not love you and would abandon you to get what he wants,” leads to –

1. Belief that my father does not love me. ➞ Fear of being unloved and emotional pain.
2. Belief that my father could abandon me at any time. ➞ Fear of abandonment and emotional pain.
3. Why does my mother say these things? She must really dislike me. ➞ Belief that I must be a bad daughter or unworthy of her love. ➞ Belief that I am generally not worthy ➞ Fear of failure, being unloved, and emotional pain.
4. Why does my father not love me? ➞ Belief that I am not worthy of love. ➞ Fear of being unloved and emotional pain.
5. My mother is a terrible person for causing me all this pain. ➞ Fear of my mother.
6. What did I ever do to get such bad parents? ➞ Belief that I am not worthy ➞ Fear of failure and emotional pain.

Each thought generates more fear and pain, which generates more negative thoughts and so on. Soon, these thoughts harden into deep beliefs, which corrodes self-esteem and self-love. The process becomes habit and as more and more afflictive emotions arise, it affects our mood and we become hypersensitive to all things that others say. This makes us mistrust people in general, because people say hurtful words, cause painful emotions, and are therefore threats. We reject and withdraw from people, thereby actualizing our fears of being unloved and abandoned.

We feel isolated and very alone. However, no man is an island and we need others to survive. So fear now compels us to seek out support and company. This can sometimes lead to extreme people pleasing or approval seeking behavior.

In this way, our competing fears make us run around in circles. When we are with people, we feel pain and suffering from perceived verbal wounds and other fears that their words activate. To avoid this pain, we isolate ourselves from people and their words. When this occurs, we feel lonely and in need of support. The pain of isolation and abandonment ultimately leads us to seek out company and the cycle continues.

I Don’t Give A F*ck Coping Mechanism

Faced with this seemingly neverending cycle of fear, many of us resort to the “I Don’t Give A F*ck” coping mechanism, which is also known as blame and denial. In short, we blame others for making us feel bad, get angry with them, and then try to convince ourselves that we do not care what people say; but of course we still *do* care because that is how our minds work.

Our mind is designed to care because that is how it learns, by absorbing information. The learning capability of our mind is a superpower because it makes us highly adaptable to changing situations. However, it also makes us highly suggestive to learning the wrong things and thus falling prey to afflictive emotions that arise from distorted beliefs of reality.

Of course I care what my mother says. She is my mother and I depended on her for survival for much of my childhood. My evolutionary drive for survival compels me to care about what my mother says, what my boss says, and what others’ say. Denying that I care does not make it so, and more importantly, it does not address the root of the pain and fear.

However, just because my mother says it does not mean it is true. Just because my own mind thinks it in the moment, does not mean it is true either. Many of the things that people say are inaccurate and driven by their own fears, pains, and past. When my mother said my father did not love me and would abandon me, she was projecting her own pain of my father leaving her and not loving her anymore. She was likely also projecting pain from her own difficult childhood and losing her mother at a young age. It had very little to do with me. Yet, my mind created all these thoughts and stories around it.

My mistake was not that I cared what my mother said, but rather that I believed what she said at the surface level. If I had looked deeper, I would have seen what my mother was truly saying, and then I would feel compassion for her, instead of fear, pain, and suffering for my own false perception of unworthiness and abandonment. Now that I see it, I can deal with my own fears of unworthiness and abandonment, so that they have less control over me the next time someone says something that triggers it. This builds emotional resiliency and self-love.

Learning to Listen Deeply

Blame and anger are very tempting tools to use, especially in the midst of fear, because blame abdicates us from responsibility of failure (it is my mother’s fault, not mine) and anger gives us a semblance of control (to avoid suffering, all I need do is avoid my mother). However, blame and anger are maladaptive coping mechanisms because they lead us to avoid the pain and fear rather than face them head-on. By blaming my mother, I avoid facing my own fear of unworthiness and abandonment. By replacing fear with anger I take the wrong action, avoiding my mother, instead of facing my original fears. In this way, my old fears grow and I create new ones – fear of my mother and more generally, fear of verbal harm from everyone around me.

Overusing blame and anger will cause our fears to multiply.

The next time that someone says something hurtful to you, remind yourself that blame and anger are pointless and will only grow our fears. Instead, try to listen below the surface into the heart of the matter. Before believing a thought or an utterance, follow it back to its causes and conditions to see if it is true. You will quickly see that in most cases, hurtful utterances have more to do with the speaker than with you. Once you see this, the utterance and all the thoughts as well as emotions that come from it will lose their power over you.

Soothing Fear with Love

There was a period of almost 10 years where fear seemed to recede in my life. It started when I met my furry soul-mate Shania and ended soon after her death. Looking back, I now see that Shania was so special to me because somehow, without even knowing it, she answered my every fear with love.

The most effective antidote to fear (aversion or withdrawal) is love (engagement). This is why phobias (extreme fears) are effectively addressed with exposure (purposeful decision to engage with that which we fear).

When we learn to understand and love that which we fear, we will no longer fear it.

That happened with my mother. When I faced my fear of my mother, and learned to understand her and her motivations, I developed compassion for her, and for the first time, learned to forgive her. This helped to release a lot of the pain from childhood that has haunted me my whole life. Note that the compassion and forgiveness helped me deal with my issues and were not done for my mother, who had sadly passed away by then.

We truly love the poor, old, sick, and dying, only when we have dealt with our own core existential fears of poverty, aging, illness, and death. When we have faced these fears, then we will be truly free to love ourselves and others unconditionally.

Most of us romanticize love. Love is joy, happiness, deep affection, kindness, generosity, gratitude, sugar and spice and everything nice. We want to believe that there is a purity to love. It transcends the calamities and suffering of this Earth, and lets us soar into the vastness of the heavens. Love is our reward for suffering.

Similarly, we vilify fear and pain. They are the tools of the devil, to be avoided at all costs for the monstrosities that they are. In purity there is certainty, and in certainty there is a kind of peace.

Unfortunately for us, reality is not pure, neither is love, nor fear or suffering. When we aspire to a love that is pure, we inflict more pain and more hurt on ourselves.

Purity of Love

Our search for a pure love or a perfect love comes from a desire to escape the impure and imperfect. Impurity and imperfection are seen as failures, weaknesses, something less than divine. Our fear of failure or of weakness drives us toward a hyper-desire of success, which leads to a need for purity and perfection.

There is nothing wrong with aspiring to success. It is only when this need is fueled by fear, leading to an intolerance of failure that we run into problems.

In reality, love is not pure. When we love, we fear and we suffer. When we love someone or something, they become precious to us and we naturally fear their loss. The deeper the love, the deeper the fear. Since nature is impermanent that loss will one day occur, at which time we will feel pain and suffering. The deeper the love, the deeper the suffering. Those are the rules of life, the way we humans are wired, and the way our reality works.

Love and Addiction

What is addiction and how does it relate to love?

Addiction is “the state of being compulsively committed to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma.”
~~[Dictionary.com]

Addiction can be seen as a condition of loving too much or loving compulsively. Life gurus commonly advise us to “not love too much”, as if love can be measured out in tablespoons, cups, and ounces. We have no more control of whom or what we love than the measure of that love.

But does addiction really originate from love?

I would argue that addiction originates from fear. When we love deeply, we fear loss. Because we fear the pain of loss, we develop an intense desire to permanently hold onto the object of our deep affection. This hyper-desire can become an addiction. We become clingy, quick to jealousy, and cannot let our love out of our sight.

After we suffer a loss, we can also become addicted to drugs, narcotics, or some other substance, person, or activity to numb or redirect our emotions from the fear and pain of loss.

My grandmother was a gambler. She lost much of her money and the family’s money due to her gambling habit. Ultimately, she was only given a fixed allowance because she could not control her addiction. I believe that she was addicted to gambling not because she loved playing cards but because she feared not having money and thus not having any value or love in life. As many of us are taught, she equated money with self-value and self-love.

Such gamblers often lose everything because they fear failing and losing their money so much that they play not based on skill but based on emotion. They make risky big bets and strategy goes out the window because fear is frequently in total control. They do not enjoy playing the game, and experience only brief enjoyment in the winning of a hand. Even the pleasure of winning quickly disappears as fear once again takes the helm and induces the gambler to win the next one and the next. Most of the time she is in terrible agony, anticipating an upcoming loss.

Love and Suffering

When we love deeply, everywhere we see love,
When love dies, everywhere we see loss and pain,
There is no escape, even for our agile consciousness.
We cannot travel to the past,
We cannot stay in the present,
We cannot go to the future,
Everywhere there is suffering.

Suffering is a human condition because love is a human condition. We are born to love and from love comes fear and suffering. When we try to deny this fact of life, we fear and suffer more. This was what happened to me when I lost my two beloved Huskies.

We are naturally wired to avoid or fear pain and suffering. However, if we overly fear suffering, then we develop a deep fear of loss, which can in turn cause us to reject love. Love can be very painful when we lose a loved one and that pain stays with us for as long as we love, which in many cases is for the rest of our lives.

Unfortunately, every time we reject love, we feed our fear of loss. As our fear gets stronger, we reject more and more, thereby leading to a very narrow and isolated life. My mother led such a life and it was not a happy one. In her quest to avoid suffering, she ended up creating a lot more unnecessary suffering for herself. She spent her life rejecting everyone and everything so she ended up alone, depressed, and full of fear.

After my dogs died, I was well on my way down that dangerous path. Luckily, an open minded doctor pointed me in the right general direction and I have since realized that the best way to deal with the fear and pain of loss is to face it head-on.

Facing fear and pain is difficult because I have to override my natural body’s inclination for protection. However, it is a very worthy endeavor because by facing fear we free ourselves to truly live and truly love. I never knew how much I let fear control my life and make decisions for me until I stopped running away from her. When I started really listening to fear, I saw that she permeated every aspect and most moments of my life.

Fear and suffering are often seen as terrible things that must be avoided at all costs. As we go through life, this fear grows. It is no coincidence that Hell is seen as a place of eternal pain and suffering.

However, when we start tending to our fear and pain, we see that they are not as monstrous as our fear and society may lead us believe. In fact, fear can be exciting, which is why many people ride roller coasters or go bungee jumping and sky diving. Fear can also enhance attraction as has been shown in many experiments. This is why scary movie date-nights are popular with the young. Emotional pain or suffering can also evoke deeper feelings of love. James Cameron’s Titanic was particularly moving because the pain of loss added a poignancy to the love.

When I let myself feel the pain of loss fully, I also feel a very deep love. Just as the dark makes the light seem brighter, fear and pain can make love more powerful. Frequently, we feel many different emotions simultaneously. Some may dominate at certain times but there is usually a mix. Love can be achingly beautiful and memories can be bittersweet. This is the reality of being human.

Unconditional Love

After facing my fears I finally understand that many of the things I thought I loved, didn’t come from love at all but from fear. I had to be perfectly successful, beautiful, youthful, happy, and productive in order to be loved. Love came with conditions … conditions set by fear. I feared failure, aging, suffering, pain, and not being useful. Most of all I feared not being loved.

I never received unconditional love from my parents and didn’t really know what it was until I met Shania and JJ. I love Shania and JJ no matter what. I love them through good and bad times, through aging and illness, and also through death. It did not matter whether they loved me in return. Every day with them was a song because I love them.

True love is unconditional love.

Many of us go through life busily looking for unconditional love, but in our mad striving we are never able to find it or even give it to ourselves. In our grasping for love we fail to recognize that true love cannot be directly pursued but ensues from us giving it to others and ourselves. Shania was especially easy to love. Whatever love I gave her she mirrored back to me many times over. Even though she is no longer with me, I will forever be grateful for sharing ten wonderful years with her.

Loving my mother is much harder. She rejected me my whole life so there are few positive memories and many painful ones. Yet, bitterness and anger of her and my difficult childhood has only created additional and prolonged suffering for myself. When we hold onto grudges and reject our natural state of loving-kindness, we hurt ourselves most of all.

In life, we often dole out love in little miserly bits as if it were a scarce resource. Love is highly valued by all, we have limitless amounts to give, and yet we selfishly hold onto it. We have silly rules and silly games that we play with each other because we fear rejection.

We are so hung up with conditions on love that we even made God’s love be conditional. There are God’s rules that must be followed, sins to avoid, karma to be accrued. We cannot enter Heaven’s gates until our ledger is properly balanced in the right way.

How to Find Love?

Since we have boundless love to give, should we give unconditional love to all? Should our love extend to even the vilest figures of history?

I do not think it is possible to give unconditional love to all. We are, after all, limited by time, and like all things we want to grow, love needs tending. Part of life is choosing which loves we wish to nourish.

The tragedy of life is that we frequently spend so much of it running away from fear that we have little time left over to tend to love. Therefore, the first step to finding love is to face our fears. If we tend to our fears, do deep listening, and weaken its hold on us, we will leave a lot of room for love to expand.

By recognizing the nature of fear, we can also start to recognize those who are filled with and controlled by fear. Sadly, both my parents fall into this category. It is important to remember that all of us have fear. It can neither be wished away nor trained into extinction. Fear will always be part of us. The trick is to tend to it properly and not be controlled by it. We can start tending to our fears at any time of our choosing. However, we have no control over the chosen time of another.

Your happiness and suffering depend on your actions and not on my wishes for you.
~~[Jack Kornfield]

It would be marvelous if my parents were able to give unconditional love but they are too beset by inherited and self-made fears to do so. It would be fantastic if they decided to change, but they have thus far chosen not to. Still, my inner child loves them in an unconditional way, and that is ok.

I was in conflict with myself for a long time over loving my parents. My adult self did not want to love people who continued to hurt and reject me, parents or no. But there is nothing wrong and in fact much good in letting a part of myself continue to love them. However, I am not on speaking terms with my father because it is only possible to have a one-sided relationship with him. Him dictating and demanding large sums of money, and everybody else following his dictates and giving him what he wants. If he ever decides to change I will happily accept him with open arms, but in the meantime, I am not holding my breath.

Memories of my childhood will always be painful and I have accepted that. My parents are not capable of giving unconditional love and I have accepted that as well. I am not sure if this is true forgiveness but this is the closest I have ever come to it.

Many life gurus advise us to practice forgiveness as if it were the easiest thing in the world. I believe that real forgiveness can only come after facing our fears and pain, going through them, and reaching a true understanding of those who have harmed us. It is this real forgiveness that is earned through pain, which can ultimately bring us to a place of peace and love.

Meaning of Life

All of us want happiness and to be loved. So we rush this way and that way looking for both. But the urgency and mad grasping comes from fear and not from love. When we realize that and stop running, when we face our suffering and stop feeding it, unconditional love will naturally emerge because it was there all along.

When we give unconditional love, it will come back to us many times over. There is no need to hurry, true love is everywhere and always within us. We only need to open our eyes and see it, through our fear and pain.

No one knows the true meaning of life, if there is one to be known. But not knowing is the essence of freedom, and freedom is a very good thing. With this freedom we can listen to the stories of others, decide for ourselves what is good and honest, and come up with our own stories to warm our hearts and fill our souls with love.

People think that we are unhappiest when we fail, but sometimes, we are unhappiest when we get all the things that we want.

I just had an article featuring my work at Forbes, I was being invited everywhere to give talks, I had glowing reviews at work including from the CEO, I have a wonderful spouse, so everything was looking awesome pawsome. Yet, I was deeply unhappy. It turned out that many of the things that I was striving for most of my life were not what I wanted after all. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they were no longer what I wanted.

When this happened, my brain started to freak-out. I quit my job and escaped into various online virtual worlds. This got old after a while, so I considered going back to work, I moved, got a dog, and various other activities. I did not know it at the time, but I was going through an existential crisis, a crisis of meaning. According to the experts, many of us go through this in our late twenties and thirties.

Then I met Shania. Shania was born with a crooked leg, but she was absolutely perfect. She had this deep joy within her, that made everyone around her happy. With Shania, everything else fell away. Life was bright, meaningful, and I was in-love for almost 10 years.

When I lost Shania and later JJ, everything resurfaced, my anxiety, depression, and existential dread. Now however, I also had to face death and loss. My anxiety ballooned into chronic proportions, I developed a variety of physical ailments, and my depression deepened until I was too tired to even get out of bed.

My Journey

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
~~[Henry David Thoreau]

How do we escape from this life of quiet desperation? How do we recover from despair? So began my journey for self-discovery.

The first thing I realized was that I was woefully ill-equipped to handle my emotions. Any bad feeling was suppressed and rejected. As a result, my life became controlled by fears. In the short-term I was totally consumed by my illness and these two fears reigned supreme –

• Fear that I will never get better.
• Fear of relapse.

Both these fears are especially insidious because they form anxiety-loops that keep feeding on my energy and keep growing my fears. “Fear that I will never get better” forms a “bad-emotion” loop.

1. Some activity, thought, or memory triggers a “bad-emotion”.
2. I start to fear that I will never get better.
3. I feel (more) physical symptoms from the fear.
4. Loop to 2 and repeat.

“Fear of relapse” forms a “good-emotion” loop.

1. Some activity, thought, or memory triggers a “good-emotion”.
2. I start to fear that this good feeling will not last. i.e. I start to fear a relapse.
3. I feel physical symptoms from the fear.
4. I start to fear that I will never get better.
5. I feel more physical symptoms from the fear.
6. Loop to 4 and repeat.

Now, any emotion causes an anxiety-loop and suffering stretches out through the limitlessness of time. All I can think of is escape – escape from thoughts, escape from emotions, escape from physical distress, escape from self. All I want is NOT to be this version of myself.

Anxiety-loops cause chronic symptoms such as insomnia, nausea, inflammation, pain, food sensitivities, environmental sensitivities, and more. Many so-called chronic diseases have been developed to label these symptoms, combined with a variety of medications to treat them. Anti-depressants is a common treatment option and was suggested by several of the doctors and specialists I visited with.

Facing My Fears, Facing My Pain

There are many strategies and complex methods suggested for recovering from this condition. Unfortunately, visiting doctors and doing online research on my symptoms made my condition a lot worse. I found out that there were lots of things that could be wrong with me. I could have SIBO, histamine intolerance, MCAS, fibromyalgia, GAD, insomnia, panic disorder, and more. This deepened my anxiety and depression.

After much struggle, I finally found an open-minded MD who pointed me in the right direction. Now better oriented, I did a lot of reading and soul searching, and finally realized that my condition had its roots in a single emotion – fear. In particular, there were two core fears powering my chronic illness, fear of fear (i.e. fear of the physical symptoms of fear) and fear of pain. The solution that finally worked for me is a fairly simple rule.

I will always try to face my fears and face my pain. In other words, I will always try to be present for my suffering.

For this to work, I first need to be aware of my emotions and fears. Mindfulness exercises are crucial for practicing how to shift my awareness so that I can focus on the most salient emotions, identify them, as well as follow them as they change.

Once I can catch my emotions, I can regulate them or calm myself using various self-soothing techniques including emotion labelling, taking the Observer position, using humor, tapping, stroking, and more.

After my mind is calm, I can start to analyze my emotions and identify what specific fear they originate from. Fear may combine with tiredness to create helplessness, which may further develop into hopelessness. Fear may combine with time to create impatience, which then develops into irritation, frustration, anger, and ultimately rage. In the analysis step I keep pushing on an emotion to find the root of the issue.

This can be very challenging because I need to keep returning my consciousness (awareness) to the fear and pain so that I may deepen my understanding of them. I believe that this is what people mean when they talk about going through the fear. Pushing through the fear until we get to the core of understanding. I try to get to the beliefs/thoughts, memories, and desires associated with each fear. For example the “fear that I will never get better” and “fear of relapse” both come from the fear of emotions, or the fear of painful physical symptoms caused by emotions.

Once I get a clearer picture of fear, I can decide whether to follow fear’s advice or to do the opposite (paradoxical-intention). Since most of my fears are not threatening or risky, I keep doing what fear tells me not to do. I deliberately bring up the fear pattern over and over again, and through this process of exposure, I am able to weaken its grip. I also readjust core beliefs that are inaccurate or discard beliefs that no longer serve me. Cognitive behavioral therapy can be useful here.

Being Present for My Suffering

There are two kinds of suffering. There is the suffering you run away from, which follows you everywhere. And there is the suffering you face directly, and so become free.
~~[Ajahn Chah]

This goal is easy to state but difficult to actualize. Facing suffering is a challenging task which is why I have spent my life trying to escape from it. However, sometimes suffering cannot be avoided and must be borne.

In such moments, we will need something to motivate us. This is what Viktor Frankl calls the meaning of suffering. In the past my love for Shania caused the fear and pain to fall away. Now, I use it as my motivation to face suffering. I want to have continued emotional and consciousness access to Shania in the form of memories, visualizations, and dreams. To do that I need to go through the fear and pain.

1. I create a desire to “build tolerance for suffering”.
2. Every time I feel fear, I face it and analyze it using the procedure above.
3. The process of facing it naturally builds tolerance, enhances my emotion regulation skills, and gives me access to my full mental landscape. As I face more fears, the thoughts, patterns, desires, and external stimuli associated with them will weaken, giving me more physical freedom in life as well. As the power of fear-based desires lessen, I have more energy for love-based desires.
4. I try to face the fear pattern for as long as possible or until the fear dissipates. Failure just means that I learn and try again. Every time I try, I build a bit more tolerance and fear weakens.

In this way, the loop that forms is now a positive one that helps to weaken fears. When we face our suffering, we will find love, happiness, limitless inner freedom, and peace on the other side.

Road to Recovery

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
~~[Friedrich Nietzsche]

Many years ago, I met a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses who tried to recruit me. They told me about Armageddon and asked me what I wanted after the death of all. I remember proudly and happily telling them that all I wanted was Shania, in this life and after death. Shania was my Heaven and my Earth and there was nothing more I needed or wanted.

Recovering from the loss of Shania is the biggest challenge of my life. Here are some of the key lessons that helped me –

1. I try to use mindfulness as much as possible to be aware of my emotions. Awareness is key so that I can catch fear before I spiral down the anxiety-loop.
2. Developing emotion regulation or self-soothing techniques is a must. Some self-soothing techniques include shifting awareness, taking the Observer position, humor, tapping, and stroking.
3. Facing fear and facing pain is difficult but necessary. Doing so weakens fear patterns as well as the unhealthy hyper-desires and downstream negative emotions associated with them.
4. Suffering is an intrinsic part of life. When suffering is out of our control, a quick acceptance is the surest way to a quick recovery. Acceptance allows us to focus our energy on what we can realistically do next rather than on wishing for impossible outcomes.
5. Once we accept our new normal, we can start to consider how best to adapt – what beliefs, behaviors, and desires need updating. Adapting means challenging ourselves to change so that we may transform pain into growth, a tragedy into a triumph.
6. The most important lesson of all is to try and to continue learning. If we try, we would have learned something today that we didn’t know yesterday. Trying and learning brings wisdom. When we stop trying is when we give in to despair and prolong our suffering. Remember that it is never too late to start trying.

Recovery need not be complicated or expensive. There is only one important step – facing my suffering. To be sure, this is a very difficult step to take but I have finally found a love that is strong enough to make me want to take that step, Shania.

Facing my suffering has opened me up to a greater authenticity and a greater love of self, spouse, and even of my dysfunctional parents. For the first time in my life I feel close to a true forgiveness of my mother and narcissistic father. My life is expanded and best of all, I have found Shania again.

Now, I see Shania in the many places we used to visit together, I see her in all the dogs that I meet, I see her when I play music or watch a movie, I see her in the trees and the wind. She is my guide and when I face fear to follow her into the darkness, I am exactly where I need to be. She is within me, beside me, everywhere around me, and I am less afraid. She is my inspiration to live a full life, in darkness and in light.

It is the greatest blessing to find a love that is so strong that inspires us to be engaged in life, even in the midst of suffering.

However, if we love life, then we naturally fear death. But if we fear death, then we will be filled with worries of illness and aging, making it difficult to love life.

There are many such conflicts that arise in life, in which love and fear create opposing desires (dualities), between which we must navigate and make judgements. When these conflicts start to dominate our lives, we develop anxiety and depression. When we are unable to adequately resolve these conflicts, our brains may get stuck, which can result in emotion loops where our anxiety and depression become chronic. Sometimes, this condition can turn into an existential crisis.

This was what happened to me after facing the death of a loved one.

Love and Fear – Overcoming Our Wiring for Suffering

Love and Fear

Love and fear are two of the strongest human emotions and they seem to work in opposition. Fear motivates us to run away while love motivates us to stay and embrace. It is difficult to love what we fear, and yet fear arises out of love.

From love comes attachment or desire. Attachment is “a feeling that binds one to a person, thing, cause, ideal, or the like (Dictionary.com).” If we already have the object of our attachment, then we will strive to grow or keep it. If we do not, we strive to acquire it. Whenever an attachment is formed, fear arises (i.e. we fear losing the object of our love).

From fear comes aversion or rejection. Fear tells us we can’t or shouldn’t do, are not strong enough to feel, or not calm enough to think. Fear tries to protect us by reminding us of our limits, real or imagined.

We are wired to see fear as something bad, unpleasant, uncomfortable, literally scary. Fear can cause us to go into a “fight-or-flight” response, which causes physiological changes that place stress on our bodies. Continued activation of our fight/flight response can result in inflammation, muscle tension and pain, insomnia, as well as various chronic physiological conditions. Fear is our enemy, the monster in the dark. Fear increases our suffering. As a result, many of us develop a strong attachment to eradicate or remove fear from our lives.

The only thing we have to fear … is fear itself.
~~[Franklin D. Roosevelt]

However, like love, fear is part of being human. We are born to fear pain, both physical and emotional. Fear and pain are an integral part of our survival system, thus they are an integral part of life. Suffering is therefore also part of life and part of being human. When we try to eradicate fear and suffering, we will inevitably fail, and create even more fear and suffering for ourselves. The best way to lessen our suffering is to embrace both love and fear.

The best way to lessen our suffering is to embrace fear and suffering.

Attachment and Aversion

Attachments are a necessary part of life. We form attachments to people, things, places, activities, beliefs, causes, and more. If we had no attachments, why would life be worth living? If nothing matters, why try to live at all?

However, even though life demands attachments, the nature of life is also one of change and impermanence. The things and people we cling or attach to today may be gone tomorrow. This creates great pain and suffering. To protect us from this pain, we develop fear and fear causes aversion.

For example, I was very attached to success in school and at work because it was my ticket to physical and financial freedom. This attachment caused me to develop a fear of failure. Unfortunately, I did not know how to tend to my fear so I just suppressed or ignored it. As time went on, my fear of failure grew until I developed a strong attachment to never failing (i.e. a strong attachment to perfect success).

This is an unhealthy attachment because unlike my original desire (freedom), it is motivated by fear. It also subsumed my original desire so now when I strived for success, I was feeding this need for perfection, which in turn further fueled my fear of failure. So round and round it went and my fear kept growing. It grew in intensity and it expanded into other areas of my life. Now my meals had to be perfect, my art had to be perfect, my spouse had to be perfect, I had to be perfect in all things. The things at which I could not be perfect, I rejected or avoided. Life quickly became stressful and very unhappy.

This anxiety loop also caused endless striving – as soon as success was achieved I worried about the next hoop I had to jump through, or the next person I had to surpass. When there was no clear next hoop, I worried about not losing my current status or position.

Anxiety loops trap us into always striving for the next goal, and cause us to miss what is right in front of us. We miss being present for life’s journey. We miss the enjoyment of learning and working towards success because we are too worried about running away from failure.

Once you realize that the road is the goal and that you are always on the road – not to reach a goal, but to enjoy its beauty and its wisdom – life ceases to be a task and becomes natural and simple, in itself an ecstasy.
~~[Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj]

All this perfectionism and striving ended up trapping me in an ever narrowing prison, which is exactly the opposite of my original desire, which was to gain more freedom. Note that attachment and striving are not “bad” in and of themselves, they only become unhealthy when they are motivated by strong fear or aversion.

Attachments are a necessary part of life.

Wisdom and Awareness

To avoid forming unhealthy attachments (fear motivated goals) we need awareness and wisdom. Awareness and wisdom tell us what the problem is, where it is coming from, and how we can effectively tend to it.

Wisdom, according to the Oxford dictionary, is “the soundness of an action or decision with regard to the application of experience, knowledge, and good judgment.” To know what knowledge and experience are relevant, as well as how to apply them, we need awareness. However, awareness can also uncover inconvenient truths about ourselves, our family and friends, our life, or our world that we find difficult to digest.

When we form an attachment to awareness, we develop a fear of learning difficult truths. This is why many of us use ignorance and delusion as coping mechanisms to reject awareness. The truth may be too painful or difficult to accept. On the other hand, I have seen firsthand what delusion and keeping up appearances have done to my parents and family. Secrets and lies are a burden to self and to those around us. False images of self and others lead to poor decisions as well as unnecessary anxieties and suffering. Love cannot thrive in an environment that is filled with secrets and lies.

This is not to say that awareness is always better than ignorance. In fact, ignorance and delusion are a natural and necessary part of life. There are many things in life that we do not have the time to learn. In addition, if we spent all of our time trying to be aware of all things, we would have no time left over for the pleasures of life.

There are also many mysteries in life that we do not know and can never explain. Questions about the soul, the meaning of life, the Creator of life and the universe, the uncaused cause. This is necessary ignorance. In fact, all of life could just be a dream or a delusion, as in Total Recall. We cannot know for sure.

I have a curious mind so I am always asking questions. This is particularly true when I am passionate about a topic. I will keep asking and digging because I want to learn and understand. The more I learn though, the more anxieties I have. Knowledge can be scary and painful. But the reward for that pain is an open mind that is able to entertain any point of view, story, or experience.

The reward for the pain of awareness is an open mind that is able to entertain any point of view, story, or experience.

Fear and Acceptance

Fear tells us to protect ourselves by setting up walls and boundaries. We identify possible threats and separate ourselves from them so that we will not get hurt physically or emotionally. We may reject activities, foods, places, relationships, uncomfortable thoughts, and painful memories. If we let fear control us, we eventually become scared, paralyzed, and alone.

As fear grows, it becomes aversion and we develop fear-motivated attachments. Such unhealthy attachments can become anxiety/depression loops and spiral downward quickly. Without careful tending, fear attachments multiply, crowding out healthy love-motivated attachments until only anxiety and depression remain. It is important to remember however, that fear comes from love, so the best way to deal with fear is to return her to love. The solution to this love-fear conflict is acceptance.

There are two kinds of suffering. There is the suffering you run away from, which follows you everywhere. And there is the suffering you face directly, and so become free.
~~[Ajahn Chah]

When we face our fears and learn to accept them, we can let love into our lives again. To face our fears we need to –

1. Be aware when we feel fear.
2. Be calm enough to name fear and embrace her. Naming fear can engage the left or logical side of our brain, which helps to regulate our emotions. Mindful breathing, becoming the Observer, visualization, journaling, talking, and tapping are further tools for self-soothing.
3. Once our minds are calm, we can analyze fear and identify the thoughts, memories, or attachments that power the emotion. What do we fear? Why do we fear it? Are our fears accurate? Cognitive behavioral therapy can be useful here.
4. Based on our analysis, we determine if we want to follow fear’s advice. This is where wisdom comes into play. If we decide that there is nothing to fear, then we lean into fear and do the opposite. We keep doing it or decide on doing it until the fear dissipates. This helps to create tolerance for that particular fear, which helps to weaken it.
5. We may also adjust or correct inaccurate thoughts or attachments that power our fears, which will further weaken the pattern.

By facing and weakening various fear patterns, we also weaken the attachments associated with those fears. Ultimately, those unhealthy attachments will no longer have any strength and we would have let them go. We also have attachments that come from love, which fulfill our heart’s desires. These we want to keep and protect from the misdirection of unfounded fears or aversion.

Only to the extent that a person exposes themselves over and over again to annihilation and loss can that which is indestructible be found within them. In this daring lie dignity and the spirit of true awakening.
~~[Jack Kornfield]

By facing and weakening various fear patterns, we also weaken the attachments associated with those fears.

Conflict and Suffering

Our brains reward certainty, permanence, and awareness, because they help in our survival. The more we know and the more stability we have in our daily lives, communities, and environment, the better our chances for survival. However, Nature is ever-changing, impermanent, and contains many mysteries. Nature also places limits on time, space, matter, and energy.

Whenever we run up against these limits, conflict arises, fear arises, and we feel pain and suffering. Since Nature’s laws are not in our control, these conflicts are difficult to resolve and can sometimes turn into anxiety loops that keep growing our fears. Because Nature imposes limits on us, pain, fear, and suffering are part of human life. They are not an affliction or illness but rather a shared universal human experience.

However, this does not mean that we are totally helpless. While some suffering is necessary, we create a lot of unnecessary suffering because our brains try to optimize for short-term pain avoidance. We end-up feeding many of our fear motivated attachments and growing our fears until we are buried by them. This is why awareness is critical. If we are aware of our fears and their related attachments, then we may tend to them and weaken their influence.

In most cases, it is difficult to tell whether our actions or strivings are motivated by love or fear. Often, it is motivated by both. Fear based attachments tend to be outcome based, so we derive very little pleasure from them. Once an outcome is reached, we quickly get driven forward by fear again. Fear causes us to prove ourselves over and over again. Love based attachments are process based, outcomes are less relevant, and there is more lasting happiness.

Rather than trying to separate out the different classes of attachments, I find it more effective to simply face my fears whenever they arise. By facing my fears I build up a tolerance for fear, and I can gradually weaken and release fear-based attachments. This gives me more freedom to form new love-based attachments and to just enjoy the process of achievement. By facing my deepest fears related to thoughts, emotions, and memories, I free myself to entertain any thought, experience any emotion, and recall any memory. In this way, I gain limitless freedom of consciousness.

Because Nature imposes limits on us, pain, fear, and suffering are part of a shared universal human experience.

Meaning of Life

We are born to want. We are born to want to give pleasure and to receive pleasure. This results in love. We are born to want to avoid pain. This results in fear.

Frequently, our wants may compete or even conflict with one another. When we develop too many fear attachments or prioritize fear attachments over love attachments, then we start to sacrifice pleasure for short-term pain avoidance. This can lead to fear crowding out love and we end-up with little pleasure and a lot of unnecessary pain.

To avoid this very unhappy state of affairs, we want to embrace our fears. When we do this, we will soon realize that beneath all that fear is a lot of emotional pain that we are too afraid to touch. The most core fear of all is the fear of pain. This is the ultimate pattern that we must dispel.

Running from pain will only strengthen our fears and lead to more suffering. Therefore, we must face our pain. This requires us to stay with the pain and experience it. We do this by using the same emotion regulation techniques as we did for fear. The more we dwell with our pain, the more skilled we become at regulating it and the more tolerance we build. When we develop enough mental discipline to dwell comfortably in pain, we truly free ourselves from suffering.

The dance of life is learning to hold both love, fear, and all the dualities they generate in loving-kindness (without judgement) and to move comfortably between them depending on circumstance. This is also known as the Middle Way in Taoism. If we only see things as black and white or good and bad, we will miss what is possible and invite into our hearts unnecessary anxiety, depression, and suffering. When we can maintain peace in the midst of conflict, when we can be comfortable in discomfort, when we can smile at our own suffering, then our consciousness is free to fly wherever it desires, and we have found Heaven on Earth.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. If there is a purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in suffering and in dying. But no man can tell another what this purpose is. Each must find out for himself, and must accept the responsibility that his answer prescribes.
~~[Gordon W. Allport]

The dance of life is learning to hold both love, fear, and all the dualities they generate in loving-kindness.

“After two months on this program, I am now a lot better. I am almost back to normal!,” they exclaim, with postings of happy, smiley pictures.

Finally, I stopped reading this depression support page because it was making me feel a lot more depressed. So what was I really feeling and why?

I was envious of their progress because this particular program was not very effective for me. I was irritated and angry with them (blame) for making me feel even worse about myself. I was very disappointed and depressed with myself for doing so poorly compared to others. Finally, I was very afraid that I would never get better because all these other people were making progress and I was only standing still or regressing.

Your Puny-Pathetic Depression is Not as Good as My Awesome Manly Depression

Depression and Envy

Comparing my own performance with that of others is something that I learned early in life and that got reinforced in my many years of schooling, as well as at work. When I was young, I competed with my brother for my father’s attention. At school, my parents told me that I wasn’t good enough unless I got perfect A’s on every subject. That was what I strived to do.

In college we were graded on a curve, so we were literally in competition with everybody else. At work, we were also graded on a curve. Only so many people got the higher percentage bonuses and salary raises. Only the best got promoted. The bottom performers got the boot, with the well-understood company motto of “move up or move out.”

In short, comparison of self to others is a commonly reinforced practice. Unfortunately for me, it led to a lot of unnecessary angst and suffering, while I quested for a perfect life. Now, I was comparing my depression with the same results. Such comparison thoughts often result in harmful self-esteem attacks such as why am I such a mess, not good enough, not strong enough, not courageous enough, and much more.

Initially, I tried to make myself feel better by talking down the person who was claiming fast success –

• She is taking antidepressants, so of course she is feeling better.
• My depression is so much more serious than hers.
• I had childhood trauma so I already started off at a disadvantage.
• She is super rich and beautiful, what does she have to get depressed about?!

However, none of these things are truly helpful, nor even true. People would also tell me to stop comparing, but that is on par with people telling me not to feel depressed, not to feel angry, or not to feel envy – it simply does not work.

So what does work? For me, the solution lies in doing more emotion-work. Here are some of my feelings –

1. Fear that I will never get better from my anxiety and depression.
2. Envy that someone else has gotten better. Shame that I haven’t gotten better.
3. Envy that someone else gets to do fun things. Shame that I cannot do those same things.
4. Anger that this group, which is supposed to make me feel better, has made me feel worse.

Fear, Envy, and Anger

Here are some thoughts and responses that were more helpful –

1. Fear and depression are just emotions, they are perfectly ok. I just need to feel them, tend to them, understand their message, and go from there.
2. I hold these problematic thoughts within me with loving compassion and analyze them. Yes, there are likely many people who have “recovered” from depression in a shorter amount of time, and that is ok. Am I happy with my own progress? Yes I am, and that is good enough!
3. In my prouder moments, I can extend my loving compassion and be happy for others. After all, I do not really want others to suffer. The suffering of others does not lighten my own suffering. On the other hand, extending loving compassion rewards me with feelings of pride and happiness.
4. What someone else says or believes has absolutely no impact on me unless I let it be so. As with the other emotions, I want to get more comfortable with envy and shame. The more ideas or belief frameworks I can tolerate, the more free I will be and the more wisdom I will gain.

Note that my feelings had very little to do with the other person or with the depression group. It had more to do with my own thoughts, beliefs, perspective, and how I deal with my emotions. In dealing with my internal landscape now, I reduce the intensity of the difficult emotions and change my perspective on the same set of facts.

Envy consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations. If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon, but Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed.
~~ [Bertrand Russell]

Depression and Envy

Depression and Shame

Depression comparison also goes the other way. A common piece of advice I received from friends, colleagues, and family about depression is to “not feel so bad because my life is very good compared to many others.”

• “Don’t feel so bad, many people have it much worse than you do.”
• “Think about all the people who have lost parents, siblings, spouses, or children.”
• “He was in a concentration camp, but look at what he is doing now.”

I feel badly for people who have suffered, especially for those who have suffered greatly. However, this does not make me feel less depressed, nor does it remove the source of my own suffering or depression. Perhaps these statements or self-thoughts may help some people, but it does little to help me. Upon closer inspection, it actually encourages feelings of shame. This type of depression-shaming only makes me feel worse. I feel like I do not have the right to feel depressed after having lost the two loves of my life, because they are not human.

Now when I start feeling depressed, I tell myself this –

Yes, I miss Shania and Lara greatly because I love them greatly. Yes, I am in pain and want to grieve, and that is ok. I can go ahead and grieve and take as much time as I want.

I cry, sing our special songs, look at photographs, recall bitter-sweet memories, and more. I no longer try to avoid my deep sorrow. I simply let myself fully experience my depression.

Often, when someone is grieving or in emotional pain, the best thing we can do is to acknowledge their sorrow, let them grieve and join them in that pain. Happy talk, social-comparisons, and depression shaming does not work well, especially in the long-term.

When someone is grieving or in emotional pain, the best thing we can do is to acknowledge their sorrow, let them grieve and join them in that pain.

Sometimes, social-comparisons may give us some pleasure in the short-term. This emotion is called schadenfreude, which is “the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another”. However, that usually only happens with smaller misfortunes and the feeling is fleeting.

A 2011 study in the journal Emotion found that people with low self-esteem were more likely to experience schadenfreude when confronted with a high achiever’s setback
~~[US News]

A Closed Heart

My mother was a very unhappy person. She spent much of her time comparing herself to others, comparing me to others, and comparing everybody to everybody else. These social-comparisons powered her inner and outer critics and they were both very strong.

I have always lived in fear of my mother. I used to avoid thinking of her and would almost have a panic attack whenever I anticipated a phone call from her. This is because she always made me feel lousy. I was never good enough, never smart enough, never good enough at playing the piano, etc. In fact, she spread her unhappiness to everyone around her. Nobody ever loved her well enough, gave her a good enough present, appreciated her enough, and I have no memories of her laughing or even smiling. She was full of negative judgements, she made the people around her suffer, and she made herself suffer most of all. This type of social-comparison led her to reject others and to reject parts of herself. One of my core fears has always been that I would turn out like her.

I have since realized that all of us have this tendency or seed within us. The question is how we choose to tend to it. Do we simply react and keep repeating this tendency until it becomes habit, or do we respond wisely and weaken its grip on us. This is in our control.

Black and white judgements lead to a closed heart. Our strong outer critic causes us to withdraw, see inadequacies in everyone, blame everyone for our unhappiness, and reject everyone around us. Our strong inner critic causes us to stop trying, see inadequacies in ourselves, blame ourselves for our condition/unhappiness, and reject parts of our body, thoughts, memories, and emotions. Our life narrows and we end up alone, feeling abandoned, hopeless, betrayed, and more depressed than ever.

Black and white judgements lead to a closed heart and we end up alone, abandoned, and betrayed.

Cultivating an open heart is not easy, but here are some things that I try to do –

1. Every time I feel the urge to criticize others, I try to catch myself, do some mindful breathing, do some self-soothing, let my irritation pass, and do something constructive. I leave the event for later analysis.
2. Every time I start to criticize myself, I try to catch it, do some mindful breathing, and analyze my thoughts and feelings. If those thoughts are inaccurate, I do some thought-correction or adjustment. If those thoughts are accurate, I work on accepting them, getting comfortable with them, and doing some self-soothing.
3. When I make mistakes, I apologize when I can, forgive myself (because breaking life-long habits is hard to do), and continue trying.

Some people wonder why I am spending so much time inside my own head. Doesn’t it make me more depressed? Doesn’t it take up a lot of my time? Isn’t it taking over my life?

Analyzing my emotions, thoughts, and memories, is very different from rejecting and suppressing them. Previously, I was putting all my effort into stopping difficult thoughts, memories, and emotions, whereas now I accept, analyze, adjust, and soothe. The more I do this, the more comfortable I am with my own mind.

In the book Be Angry: The Dalai Lama on What Matters Most, they talk about how analyzing thoughts and emotions within a healthy framework can “transform deep pain into limitless freedom.” Such a journey is worth all the time in the world.

Only to the extent that a person exposes themselves over and over again to annihilation and loss can that which is indestructible be found within them. In this daring lie dignity and the spirit of true awakening.
~~[Jack Kornfield]

The journey to transform pain into limitless freedom is worth all the time in the world.