Preface 1: This is not advice, I’m not a ‘guru’, and I haven’t got any answers for anyone
Let me start as I mean to go on; far from being advice, these videos and blogs aim for two main things: 1) to provoke questions about the norms we are sometimes enmeshed in without realising and 2) to communicate with you the reader/watcher whilst on a never-ending journey of finding answers to the problem of my own existential dilemmas.
This blog particularly does the latter. It’s autobiographical in nature. Let me tell you why:
Preface 2: St. Augustine.
St. Augustine was the first in literary, philosophical, religious, spiritual history to draw together the works of the most notable philosophers that came before him and use them to begin a revolutionary way of answering the biggest questions about human existence. No one before him had taken a ‘confessional’ approach. Never before had the author added the dimension of their own failings, their own struggles in the work which was to be read by others. Indeed his greatest work ‘Confessions’ could be said to have birthed autobiographical writing and also the very notion of therapy.
What was the theme?
Just that trivial issue again of ‘how should humans live?’
If you’re new to these blogs, you will begin to see that this is the question that comes up over and over, it’s the reason for most if not all of the content. It has given birth to all the philosophies, morals, ethics, science, religions and other spiritual modalities.
Fast forward to no now, and this is the form of communication and investigation I am in alignment with. So let me restate this time with the context why I am not a guru and won’t claim to be.
Provocation and investigation are my aims.
With that said, lets address the question of what we do during crisis:
Difficult times recently, inner crisis
There have been a lot of testing and trying situations over the last couple of years, taking me to the limit of my mental resources, the limits of my feeling of safety, to many crisis points. It’s been the roughest time since feeling so bad I had to change something for fear losing life itself, many years ago.
Episodes were spread out over a long period of time but very clearly all part of the same movement. A downward momentum. Many of the things I thought were constants in my life, things that gave me a sense of identity and a sense of safety and security, like home, money, health, relationships etc either went up in smoke or came perilously close to it.
Events conspired to bring to the surface the worst of my fears and anxieties. Plain and simply, it was experienced as crisis. It was ‘sink or swim’ time. At least that’s how it felt. In hindsight, it seems merely like changes I simply had to adapt to. I suppose that’s only now with a sense of perspective and brings us to the question of ‘what do we do when in crisis?’ which is inextricably linked to the age old question of ‘how ought we to live?’ My answer to these questions was the answer to my crisis.
Coping: pleasure, distraction, addiction
Before arriving at any meaningful solutions I resorted to behaviours that could be deemed as any one or all of the following terms; distractions, addictions, escapism, or behaviours that have some medicative aspect to them.
There are many amazing things in the world we can do to block out pain and suffering.
We can get short terms energy kicks from ingesting stimulants and sugar and processed foods. We can ingest things purely just to give us a sense of a change in state, our normal state being either unsatisfactory or unbearable. Many of these things come in the form of the pleasures of food, drink, alcohol and other substances which are normalised. There are the pleasures of carnal desire, the pleasures of entertainment of all forms, and countless things from mind numbing distraction to thrill seeking and adrenaline highs.
These actions are like reaching for a rope to pull me away from fear, pain, anxiety , stress and misery, like attempting to block, dampen, or even suppress such things. I have resorted to all of the above in times of feeling powerless, on the receiving end of life’s changes and feeling like it’s too much to acknowledge, too much to bear.
I am not judging all of this behaviour as ‘bad’ but there is a definite correlation with feeling like shit and an increase in many or all of those behaviours, none of which address the underlying cause and provide a remedy. They are simply the coping mechanisms of someone looking for an efficient (quick) fix in the circumstances. They are all, in ways, attempts to reduce suffering albeit insufficient ones.
It follows then that there is a correlation also between feeling my best and less of a reliance on those pleasures and distractions.
What helps, what do I turn to?
Let’s talk a bit about the nature of suffering. For me, entwined in my suffering is a general sense that I don’t think things are going to work out. This is a spectrum ranging from complete and utter feelings of impending doom to small anxious niggles that disturb me so subtle I don’t even recognise it.
Therefore I make the link between PAIN and TRUST, or the lack thereof.
Without going into too much detail, it’s a certainty for me, and absolute truth that there is no room for BOTH pain and trust. The two can’t coexist. All my pain ends in mental and emotional pain, existential pain. But nothing hurts if I am convinced that all will be as it should be and that I am ok.
Getting to this stage has been probably the most monumental climb of my lifetime. There was a time when I didn’t even know what it meant to feel trusting. Not just feel it, but embody it, in my actions. This further step you could call FAITH. For me, trust is like love in the sense that it is something you do, rather than something you have. Having faith is when there is utter conviction in your actions, in the general state of being. Everything is as it should be, and things will be ok.
I am not in negative concern about outcomes small or large.
What I am talking about above is more of an endpoint than an immediate band aid for problems. For me it’s an endpoint to many years of application from searching in many areas.
I make the point more to show the relationship between pain and trust. Maybe we can ponder, when we suffer how trusting do we feel? How sure and secure about the future?
If I was to hazard a guess it’s likely to show that same relationship.
How you get from fear to trust or from pain to trust is then your own journey.
It’s here that I have to make a case for an approach to life which is deemed ‘spiritual’.
The criticism is that spiritual/religious impulses and organisations only seem to take in the vulnerable, getting people when they are weak. They make false promises as a way of pacifying the weak or the ignorant, it is said in some quarters. The spiritual only has relevance when people are struggling.
I have to chuckle at this, because this is precisely why these modalities and principles do exist. It is a given that humans suffer, there’s no way around it. We need something to turn to in those times otherwise the suffering is greater than it should be, unnecessary. An extraordinary amount of solace has been found by people in complete despair by abiding by some of the universal principles of developing trust in something other than thyself.
What actually is crisis?
I am not making the case that people need to get religious when in crisis. Apologies if that’s how it comes across.
I am however drawing an interesting link between the how the state of faith soothes mental anguish and what certain spiritual modalities appear to offer which is a means to exactly that.
Mental anguish, the main feature of the crisis mode, is the worry about what might happen. All of anxiety and fear live under this umbrella.
It could even be said that we spend more time suffering from the anticipation of pain or illness than the thing itself, sort of like the counterpoint to Oscar Wilde’s ‘anticipation is the purest form of pleasure.’
We need to feel safe and secure. Anything which affects that, at least in thought, is suffering. When we are overwhelmed by this, we are in crisis.
Practical, holistic solutions
There are, of course, many many different other things, more practical things we can do when we suffer or are having a hard time. A holistic view of health would include all the micro changes we can make when it comes to diet, intoxicants, exercise, creative and fun activity, natural surroundings, community, friendship, medication and much more. As mentioned earlier, there is a definite correlation between feeling well and doing some or all of these things to some degree.
However, there have definitely been times where I have had long periods looking after those kinds of things but a remaining inability to shake off the existential dread. It’s lurking. Sometimes ‘healthy’ behaviour can be distractions in disguise. Dancing around the issue.
Facing fears. Overcoming anxiety. Giving up resistance
The journey with the most certain rewards is a journey where I ultimately face my fears. What exactly is it about the future, my thoughts around it, that make me uncomfortable? What is causing that?
All roads seem to lead to a need to do self-inquiry or self inventory and then surrender – the giving up of control and acceptance of conditions, internal and external.
Inherent in fear and pain is resistance.
You could say pain is in two parts;
the thing causing the pain
how we react to that.
When we resist it or recoil, pain intensifies. Anxiety works on this principle. The most successful way of treating anxiety (by no means easy or short term) is to accept it, even to be curious, willing to feel it, to let it be there. It’s paradoxical.
And this approach could be applied to all worry, to all of life’s conditions and concerns. As in can we accept, can we decrease our resistance to ‘what is’, the whole of reality?
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