Getting rid of the hurt feeling
| Swami Chaitanya Keerti Human beings are emotional by nature. Throughout our daily life, we go through a variety of emotions. A negative comment from a friend or a relative may trigger a certain emotion of sadness, self-pity, depression or anger. A positive comment from another friend may elevate or uplift us to happiness and joy. And these emotions keep appearing repetitively creating certain tracks and grooves in our psyche. They start functioning as memory bank--wounded memories and happy memories. These bundles of memories become a memory bank that creates a certain identity for us-- a certain ego. We see ourselves as an image contributed by so many people who relate with us every day. And we become so much identified with this image that we forget our authenticity. This artificial image is Maya, our appearance. This is not our reality or our real face. The whole art of meditation is to peel off these layers of images given to us by others and come face to face with our real self--what Lord Krishna calls Svadharma. The self-realization is Svadhyaya beyond the ego made of all the false images collected unconsciously from others. Our soul becomes covered by the clouds of the smoke of emotions and thoughts. Our consciousness gets entangled into the cob-webs of emotional reactions, and this entanglement leads to all kinds of miseries. We call it our karmas that keep our consciousness in bondage. This is the root cause of all our troubles in our life. Swadhyaya and the self-exploration is a way of going beyond these entanglements of our emotions and thoughts and realizing our pure consciousness without any content. We need not carry any preconceived ideas when we go within ourselves, into our interiority, inner lab of consciousness. It is a scientific journey. When a scientist is experimenting, he simply experiments without any judgment, without any conclusion. So we have to be the scientists in your inner world. Let our mind be our lab, and we observe — with no condemnation, appreciation or judgment of any kind. When there is no conclusion, our eyes become clearer. Before we go all the way to explore our being, we need to do something to become unburdened of our loads of emotions and thoughts. This requires a certain degree of awareness in our daily life. Osho suggests: “Live a little more consciously. And when you find yourself getting into the old habit, just do the opposite immediately. Sadness or anger is not the problem. The problem is the old rut, which is why the trick is to get out of the rut immediately. Anything will do. Go for a long walk, start dancing, because emotions need outlets. By changing the response to emotion, you move from the beaten track to something different. You have never danced before when you were unhappy and sad, so you will puzzle the mind. The mind will feel at a loss — what to do? — the mind can only function with the old. Anything new, and the mind is simply inefficient…Ironically, most of us become very efficient at wallowing in our pet emotion, be it anger or jealousy, sorrow or fear. Osho suggests another exercise about pain. “If somebody has hurt you, feel thankful that the person has given you an opportunity to feel a deep wound. Why so? Because that person has triggered a process by making you see a wound, which might have been “created by many hurts that you have suffered in your whole life.” Just close the door to your room, sit silently, with no anger for the person but with total awareness of the feeling that is arising in you: the hurt feeling that you have been rejected, that you have been insulted, counsels Osho. “And then you will be surprised that not only is this person there: all the men and all the women and all the people who have ever hurt you will start moving in your memory.” Experience the pain during the process of reliving the memories, and then, importantly, absorb it. It is such valuable energy, don’t throw it away… It may take a few days for you to be able to digest it, but the day it happens, you have stumbled upon a door that will take you really far, far away.” The moment you accept the pain with no rejection anywhere, its energy and its quality change, it is no longer pain.” |
