Your reality is not painful at its core. But in order to understand that, you need to first surrender to what makes it look like it is only pain: your unconscious wounds.
We have created all sorts of devices, methods and means to dodge anything that is real and related to reality itself because we associate reality with inescapable pain.
The bad news is that there is nowhere else to truly live outside of the present moment, outside of what is. Your mind may be projecting the future, may be thinking about the past, it may operate on concepts, ideas and imagination, you may go into the angelic realms and have ethereal experiences, but in the end the only place one lives their life in is in reality and the present moment. Not doing that is anything but conscious living and presence. Conscious presence can only take place in the now and now can only belong to reality. Here are the 3 stages of our fight with reality.
1. Grappling with the pain that we associate with reality. We refuse to see clearly and to see reality as it is and are still unconscious and unaware of how damaging the denial we live in is for us. We're in resistance.
2. Stage 2 is all about giving up the fight because you start to see how futile it is to resist what is and you begin to surrender to the reality of your pain. At this stage you also start to get familiar with this suffering that you once denied and dismissed for so long. You accept the flow of your life.
3. This phase is all about understanding a deeper truth, and that is that reality in and of itself is not actually painful, but it is neutral* (non-dualistic). This is how you take control over your own life and start creating the reality you want.
I will elaborate on these stages. But first I want to clarify what acceptance and surrendering means.
Accepting where you are on your journey in your life doesn't mean giving up on wanting or desiring to grow and change. Acceptance means acknowledging the reality of where you are. If you break your leg and you don't accept the reality of the fact that you cannot walk, you won't be able to start healing. This is what acceptance means. It is seeing reality for what it is, not for what we want it to be. Even if this sounds pretty self explanatory and obvious, it couldn't be farther from the truth. You'd be surprised at how creative human beings are at avoiding reality and overlaying it with wishful thinking and other means of running away. To our ego, acceptance equals giving up. Our ego is programmed to fight to death to protect us and keep us surviving, even if that, in the long run, proves to be detrimental for our well being.
To see reality is the first major step on your spiritual awakening. To see and accept and then surrender to reality is a huge leap of faith and an extremely deep understanding of what is actually going on and what spirituality is all about.
Believe it or not, there is a lot of fear, moreso terror linked to accepting and surrendering. Someone who is in fear of letting go (which is the same thing as accepting, even if at a first and shallow glance, one may believe they're opposites) someone who cannot let go cannot live in reality. Why is there so much fear of accepting reality?
Because of the ego. The ego does everything to prevent one from seeing what is real because what is real is the denied pain. And to the ego accepting reality translates into accepting pain. And how can one possibly accept pain? The ego's main job and purpose is to do everything humanly possible to counteract that, that's what it is designed for. Protecting you from pain, which lies in the realness of your wounds that you have denied, your ego equates it with helping you survive. That is the reason why we develop coping mechanisms and defense mechanisms and all sorts of life saving strategies in the first place: to avoid reality. Because reality was excruciatingly painful at one point and the ego is desperate to never feel that again. Which is understandable and natural. Nobody can blame the ego for doing everything possible in order to keep us alive. However the strategies that once literally saved our lives and protected us from further psychological harm are now hindering us. They are in fact a nuisance now, in adulthood, because our subconscious (where these strategies reside) is standing in the way of our living authentically and purposefully by replaying these unconscious mechanisms that stop us from accepting reality. Our subconscious registered, in the past, (when bad things happened to us and we hence developed these mechanisms of survival with the help of the ego),our subconscious registered that danger lies in the present moment, in reality. This is how the ego took the reins and started fabricating tactics to deny the immediate reality. But what once saved our lives and protected our mental health is now detrimental for our well being.The terror that precedes acceptance of reality is the ego putting up the resistance to it. The ego fears that survival is at stake when one stops denying the realness of their pain. To ego, reality can only be pain, an overwhelming and unendurable pain. The ego cannot fathom that reality can be and is actually loving and beautiful if we allow ourselves to live in it without judgment and attachment of how we think or expect it to be.
Think of it this way: When you feel a negative emotion that is too strong and you feel like you cannot handle it and lessen its intensity, what is one thing you unconsciously do? Distract yourself from it. We all do it. That's the ego taking the reins and pushing away the reality of you being in pain. When you feel that surge of pain or anger or sadness, what do you resort to? Anything to dampen it. You pick up a cigarette. You turn to your smartphone to scroll mindlessly for hours, you crave junk food, you think happy thoughts, you blame it on others etc. Well, accepting reality and surrendering to it is doing the opposite. Instead of picking up the cigarette when you're triggered into a negative emotion, being in acceptance and surrender to the reality would be you saying "This thing makes me sad/angry/fearful and I don't know what to do about it." This is acceptance of what is. This is authenticity, this is honesty, this is accepting that what you feel is what you feel. You stop playing pretense. Accepting reality when reality is seemingly uncomfortable takes courage and commitment to yourself and to healing. Accepting reality is you no longer betraying yourself and abandoning your pain, your needs, the aspects in you that need to be seen and accepted as they are.
Accepting and surrendering to reality is one of the most powerful things that someone can do. Naturally, if and when one does this, it is usually a consequence of an ego death that happened prior and that eased one's way into accepting what is and hence taking steps towards spirituality. You cannot see and surrender to reality unless your ego has allowed you to first and that only happens if it dies or at least it dampens and lessens its grip on you. One of the signs of ego death would be the realization that all resistance and fight against what is is futile and is tiring,leading nowhere. You naturally start accepting and surrendering to reality then and you slip into the second stage I mentioned earlier. Once you accept your pain, your sorrow, your traumas, they can no longer possess you, they can no longer dictate how you see and perceive reality, they can no longer decide what is right and wrong for you. Because believe it or not, one can decide that something is right for them just in order to get away from or out of fear for whatever its opposite is. You want to be rich because you're afraid of being poor and you want to be in a relationship out of fear of being alone. These 2 examples show you how a person's traumas can decide unconsciously for them what is right. But that's not what is truly right for their soul, it is what is right for the ego to survive and avoid pain. You want to be rich because of the experience of it, because it feels good. That is a different vibrational place than wanting to be rich because of avoiding the pain of being poor. But 99% of the people want to run away from looking at what the fear of being poor means because that would mean accepting the reality of their fear and exploring it. The ego prevents that from happening when it sugarcoats everything. You could not get closer to who you are more than you would if and when you got closer to and accepted reality. Because who you authentically are is always and without exception in reality.
After the first phase, when you are in resistance to reality and do whatever necessary to not be present, the futility of this pushing against reality with no results may eventually bring you into the second phase, that of starting to anchor yourself in what is real, if you allow yourself to. So how do you make the transition from resisting reality to flowing with it and towards it? The very first thing you need to do is to start becoming mindful and aware of the feelings associated with the concept of living in reality. As I said earlier, there is a gripping fear of letting go of ones mechanisms of denial of reality and when you think of reality and the concept of reality, pay attention to the feeling that arises and accompanies it. What does it feel like to be talking about reality and what is real? What does it feel like to think and conceive of living in reality? For most people, actually, reality is automatically associated with negative emotions and feelings. You either feel pain, discomfort, sadness, you may feel stuck, trapped, powerless, uncomfortable, unease, bored even at the thought of living in reality. Close your eyes and sit with those feelings. Why is reality so bad for you? Why is the present moment so terrifying that you do whatever it takes to escape it? Ask yourself these questions while keeping your eyes closed.
This is a practice you need to do over and over again if you commit to accepting and surrendering to reality. You will eventually find that at one point in your life, something so terrifying and painful happened that your ego/conscious mind decided that it's best and safer to live outside of what is real. It doesn't have to be a huge traumatic event that happened to you. Traumas are also made up of micro traumas that occured consistently enough that it created in you this strategy of rejecting reality and realness. Doing this over and over again will eventually weaken your ego's grip on the idea it has ingrained in you about what reality is. Ego starts dying when it runs out of excuses and justifications for its beliefs. Your commited practice of questioning your fixed and conventional understanding of what reality is saps your ego's defenses in time. When ego is pushed into a corner and beliefs, identity, ideologies, concepts are all wrung out of it, when there is nowhere left to run and hide behind, that's when ego dies. And it will feel like you are literally dying. When this happens, you will eventually start to transition into naturally accepting reality for what it is, not how you perceive it through your skewed, distorted filter that trauma and your past experiences have shaped your view on reality. And you will see reality is nothing but consciousness. Reality is not good or bad, it does not operate in duality like you'd think. If you havea painful existence, it is not the fabric and the core of reality that is painful and therefore negative. It is never the reality in and of itself that is one way or the other.
Once you start healing the filter through which you perceive reality, you will see and understand how everything just is,everything around you is just beingness. If you're poor, it's not because reality is against you. It's because of the core beliefs you hold around money that shapes the immediate reality you live in. You need to become aware of the reality of the limiting beliefs around money so that these beliefs stop being subconscious and hence by doing so, by making them conscious with the help of the focus of your awareness, you take control of them. If you're alone and hate the reality of it, this should teach you about the reality and realness of the loneliness and emptiness that you feel inside. But all of this is tremendously uncomfortable to say the least. All of this is actually so throbbingly aching that 99% of the people will never go through this process throughout their lifetime. Ego won't let them. But you should not feel guilty or less than if you find yourself unable to do it now, it's understandable why it's not easy, it's a matter of survival (and survival does not only mean physical survival, it also implies the psychological survival of identity and self concept).
Reality is actuality. Everything that is real is actual and everything that is actual is in your immediate reality. All the chatter, the judgments, the labels that flow endlessly in your mind act like a huge barrier between you and self actualization, as self actualization can only happen in the present moment, where reality is. Self actualization is going beyond your beliefs, ideas, needs, self actualization is accepting and surrendering to what is.
And so how do you go about starting to slowly anchor yourself in reality? So, what does acceptance and surrender of reality actually entail? Assuming you're in the beginning stage of your surrender to reality, you need to practice sitting with your uncomfortable emotions and not abandoning yourself anymore. Close your eyes and deliberately allowing yourself to feel bad. Because that is what is real in the moment for you. Let yourself feel it, let yourself be immersed in it. Practice this in a deliberate manner and you will soon naturally surrender to the reality and realness of your wounds. Don't use meditation to escape reality, don't use spirituality to eschew yourself and your reality. There is a fine line between doing spiritual practices to process and transmute the negative emotions and doing practice to evade and feel good in the moment at all costs. This is you avoiding to surrender to the reality. Then I ask you how is a spiritual practice in this case better than an addiction? Its not. Both are used to escape. But now going back to your practice of surrendering. Sitting with yourself in your most uneasy moments, ask yourself What would be so bad about me accepting and surrendering to reality as it is in this moment? What would I lose by not denying to feel the negative emotions anymore? After you become conscious of the fact that nothing bad is actually going to happen by looking at reality of your traumas dead in the eye, you mellow and start softening your resistance.
This is how you begin to surrender to the realness and reality of the wounds and pain that make you see reality through their skewed filter, a filter that sends you the message that reality's core and fabric, it's very essence, is pain. That is not real reality, that is your interpretation of reality.
The final stage of your surrender is the understanding that reality in and if itself is not pain, nor is it happiness. Have you noticed how, when something good happens to you, suddenly reality becomes acceptable and beautiful, but 2 min ago, right before that good thing happened to you, the very same reality was gloomy to you? Nothing fundamental changed about reality. It was only your perception of it that changed.
At the end of it all, the epiphany that will strike you hopefully is that reality is nothing but your awareness, nothing but your consciousness. Reality is direct experience and expression of your consciousness. But before you even get to this point, the biggest challenge is your choice and conscious decision to stop running away from your own life and start living it in reality. No one can decide that for you and 90% of the people, maybe even more, choose to live their entire lives behind the ego, within the fear of reality that their ego distracts them from. They choose over and over again to hide behind addictions and to never be truthful about how much they dread the agonizing reality of their pain.
Until you give into admitting and acknowledging this grief in your heart, reality and the present moment will forever remain a bitter experience that you will do anything to escape and dismiss. Don't let this be your life.
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