Dear friends,
There is a Bulgarian movie called The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner, based on the novel by the same name. I’ve neither seen the movie nor read the novel, but the title is not something you forget easily.
The past month has been quite difficult for me. By now, I’ve learned that inner healing usually involves an encounter with long-avoided hurt… But it is one thing to know this as a principle, and quite another to experience it anew. And yet this latest cycle of my journey has brought me a new understanding of healing.
I now know I’ve been fleeing from suffering for most of my conscious life—through compulsive behavior and thinking, through workaholism, perfectionism, and countless other semi-conscious avoidance strategies. It took years of personal work and therapy for me to discover that fact. It took me decades to understand that sometimes (often) the healthiest thing you can do about suffering is to just allow yourself to experience it.
As soon as I recognized my avoidance of difficult emotions, I swung to the other extreme, and my defense mechanisms adopted a new strategy: trying to solve suffering. Now my response became mindfulness, or rather, an aggressive, impatient attempt at mindfulness. My assumption was that if I just concentrated my awareness in the right way, it would dissolve every experience that is not peaceful, joyful, and loving. Our “original mind” is free of defilements and suffering, the Buddhists say, so I concluded that if I was suffering, that just meant I was not mindful enough.
