Day 453: Addicted to Pain

I had a strange experience/realisation this morning: I had the sniffles from cleaning my stable, what with all the dust floating around (we haven't had rain in over a month now) and my nose had that ticklish feeling, like it wants to sneeze - but doesn't. So I sniffled about for a while, but when it reached a point of super-irritation I got some tissue out of my jacket to blow my nose. Just after I blew my nose, that ticklish feeling went away and I was left feeling a pleasant release, a relief of being liberated from having a ticklish-sneezy-sniffles-nose. Then I stopped. I realised that what would be even better than this relief would have been to have not been sniffly at all in the first place, and then I actually had this kind of regret for stopping this feeling of relief inside myself. I chuckled at myself.

So in other words, we have these "negative" experiences throughout our lives, but when we compare them to the "positive" experiences, or when the "negative" experience stops, we feel a sense of release inside ourselves. It's almost like a high - like our stomachs fell lighter and a weight has been lifted from our shoulders. We like this feeling. We like it enough to continue participating in the positive-negative game without really being aware of what it is we're participating in.

A lot of the time, we are simply creating positive experiences by comparing how we feel when we are in the "negative" experience to how we feel when we are not in the "negative" experience - call it neutral. Because neutral feels so much better than negative when we compare the two, we turn it into a positive experience. And so, we create the polarity experience within ourselves of positive and negative simply because that is what we were taught to do and now, it feels like something is "missing" within us if we do not play on the see-saw of polarity energy - in other words, we are addicted.

We live in this constant state of comparison - comparing the good times with the bad, using it as a pick-me-up. Some people are addicted to feeling the lows of the bad times, preferring to wallow in depression by focusing on the negative experiences and comparing the positive experiences to those negative ones, always seeing the bad as a more powerful experience than the good.

Since we don't understand that existing in these up and down experiences is a form of energy generation - as opposed to being something that supports us in being able to live with clarity - we just keep on "feeding the beast", riding the waves of energy. We can't really comprehend being without it as it has become a fundamental part of our psyches. Obviously all of this makes it makes it quite difficult for us to consider that there is another way to live without the ups and downs, a way that doesn't involve using negative experiences just to create positive ones. It is possible to enjoy a moment without having to compare it in your mind to a bad moment. It is possible to breathe in all of life in every moment, without the drama of chasing bad feelings with good, or vice versa.

The moment after clearing one's sinuses with a sneeze or a tissue may be a moment to enjoy, but the moment we use that relief in a comparison to the sniffles is the moment we resume feeding the polarity energy beast. It also clouds our view of ourselves and our situation so that we miss important observations and realizations, because we are all-consumed by the energy waves rising up and crashing down.