Post by Admin on Mar 6, 2024 12:11:25 GMT
How to enjoy your problems
Accepting your problems is one thing. To enjoy them? Well, that’s pretty much enlightenment. Here’s how to get there
by Chelsea Harvey Garner
psyche.co/guides/how-to-enjoy-your-problems-and-reach-enlightenment
As a therapist, I’ve found that so much of what I do is about giving people the space to say what they’re struggling with. It can take them months. Not to resolve the problems, or even to understand them in a deep, philosophical sense, but literally just to realise what their problems are.
This is especially true for people with complicated conundrums, stressors that are difficult to explain. There’s a special loneliness reserved for people in this situation – who are facing problems that seem weird and who worry that, if they let themselves admit how bad things are and how bad they feel, they’ll realise they’re too messed up to recover. If you recognise this description, I know how you’re feeling. I’ve experienced these fears too.
If you can learn to enjoy your problems, that’s enlightenment
The day of my mom’s funeral, I wrote and delivered her eulogy. Trembling and dissociative, I spoke my shaky words into the small crowd of faces, many of whom I didn’t recognise, most of whom avoided looking at me or at her body, freshly embalmed and glowing under buzzing lights like a gas station hot dog. I hadn’t eaten in days, and I’d been up late the night before fighting with my birth mother, whom I had not seen in years. She’d reappeared when she heard the news about her mother, who was also my mother, having adopted me when I was at a young age. Years of poverty and addiction had made my birth mother desperate, and theoretically I knew that. But there’s nothing theoretical about throwing a sandwich at someone, especially when that person is a stranger to you, but also the person whose body made yours, and they’re stuffing your inheritance into a dirty pillowcase to flee with it.
When you tell someone your mom died, they feel bad for you. Even if they haven’t been through that, they know it’s a big deal. And they know what to say: ‘I’m so sorry, Chelsea. Please let me know if I can help.’ But I found that’s not the response you get when you tell the boss at your new job you’re late because you just found out you were never adopted, and the witness signature in your mom’s will wasn’t signed, so it’s actually legal for your estranged birth mother to steal your inheritance and spend it on drugs. (Well, the drugs aren’t quite legal.)
People also didn’t know what to say when they asked why I was crying between therapy sessions, and I told them my ex tried to get back together, but I said ‘no’ because I was in a grief stupor, I’d fallen in love with someone much younger, who then ghosted me and now I’ve lost them both at once. Also, my bank account was overdrawn so I was eating beans until payday, which meant I’d been farting in sessions. Maybe that’s why they just said: ‘Damn. Well… your 3 o’clock is here.’
Put another way: there are some problems that are considered OK to talk about and some that aren’t. There are problems people put on the front page of their memoir, and problems they, well, edit out. But regardless of whether other people get your problems, you have to get them. You have to accept your life, absurd as it may be, and try to find some joy in it. And if you can get past accepting and learn to enjoy your problems? Well, that’s pretty much enlightenment. That’s what this Guide is about.
Whatever it looks like, your life is worth celebrating
I first read the phrase ‘enjoy your problems’ in 2017. I was doom-scrolling Tumblr when I came across a blurry shot of a concrete wall with those words scrawled in Sharpie. It wasn’t well done enough to be called graffiti, which enhanced its charm. I was struck by its simplicity, the way it suggested doing exactly the opposite of what humans usually do. Most of us spend our lives denying we have problems. Does it work? Never. But that doesn’t stop us from wasting a lot of time trying.
After some Googling, I learned that the saying is attributed to the Zen monk Suzuki Roshi, a teacher who helped popularise Buddhist teachings in the United States, founded the San Francisco Zen Center, and wrote the book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (1970). In Buddhism, equanimity is one of the four brahmavihārās or boundless qualities, which are seen as keys to cultivating an open, awakened state of being. Equanimity, in modern English, is defined as ‘evenness of mind especially under stress.’
In many mindfulness communities, Buddhist equanimity is interpreted as a sort of neutrality, a lack of preference about what happens to us: ‘I could get the job, or not. I could become wealthy, or I could remain poor. Either will provide opportunities for enlightenment.’ That kind of thing. Often, though, this receptivity gets mistaken for apathy, which can make us think that being numbed out and aloof is the ideal.
Accepting your problems is one thing. To enjoy them? Well, that’s pretty much enlightenment. Here’s how to get there
by Chelsea Harvey Garner
psyche.co/guides/how-to-enjoy-your-problems-and-reach-enlightenment
As a therapist, I’ve found that so much of what I do is about giving people the space to say what they’re struggling with. It can take them months. Not to resolve the problems, or even to understand them in a deep, philosophical sense, but literally just to realise what their problems are.
This is especially true for people with complicated conundrums, stressors that are difficult to explain. There’s a special loneliness reserved for people in this situation – who are facing problems that seem weird and who worry that, if they let themselves admit how bad things are and how bad they feel, they’ll realise they’re too messed up to recover. If you recognise this description, I know how you’re feeling. I’ve experienced these fears too.
If you can learn to enjoy your problems, that’s enlightenment
The day of my mom’s funeral, I wrote and delivered her eulogy. Trembling and dissociative, I spoke my shaky words into the small crowd of faces, many of whom I didn’t recognise, most of whom avoided looking at me or at her body, freshly embalmed and glowing under buzzing lights like a gas station hot dog. I hadn’t eaten in days, and I’d been up late the night before fighting with my birth mother, whom I had not seen in years. She’d reappeared when she heard the news about her mother, who was also my mother, having adopted me when I was at a young age. Years of poverty and addiction had made my birth mother desperate, and theoretically I knew that. But there’s nothing theoretical about throwing a sandwich at someone, especially when that person is a stranger to you, but also the person whose body made yours, and they’re stuffing your inheritance into a dirty pillowcase to flee with it.
When you tell someone your mom died, they feel bad for you. Even if they haven’t been through that, they know it’s a big deal. And they know what to say: ‘I’m so sorry, Chelsea. Please let me know if I can help.’ But I found that’s not the response you get when you tell the boss at your new job you’re late because you just found out you were never adopted, and the witness signature in your mom’s will wasn’t signed, so it’s actually legal for your estranged birth mother to steal your inheritance and spend it on drugs. (Well, the drugs aren’t quite legal.)
People also didn’t know what to say when they asked why I was crying between therapy sessions, and I told them my ex tried to get back together, but I said ‘no’ because I was in a grief stupor, I’d fallen in love with someone much younger, who then ghosted me and now I’ve lost them both at once. Also, my bank account was overdrawn so I was eating beans until payday, which meant I’d been farting in sessions. Maybe that’s why they just said: ‘Damn. Well… your 3 o’clock is here.’
Put another way: there are some problems that are considered OK to talk about and some that aren’t. There are problems people put on the front page of their memoir, and problems they, well, edit out. But regardless of whether other people get your problems, you have to get them. You have to accept your life, absurd as it may be, and try to find some joy in it. And if you can get past accepting and learn to enjoy your problems? Well, that’s pretty much enlightenment. That’s what this Guide is about.
Whatever it looks like, your life is worth celebrating
I first read the phrase ‘enjoy your problems’ in 2017. I was doom-scrolling Tumblr when I came across a blurry shot of a concrete wall with those words scrawled in Sharpie. It wasn’t well done enough to be called graffiti, which enhanced its charm. I was struck by its simplicity, the way it suggested doing exactly the opposite of what humans usually do. Most of us spend our lives denying we have problems. Does it work? Never. But that doesn’t stop us from wasting a lot of time trying.
After some Googling, I learned that the saying is attributed to the Zen monk Suzuki Roshi, a teacher who helped popularise Buddhist teachings in the United States, founded the San Francisco Zen Center, and wrote the book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (1970). In Buddhism, equanimity is one of the four brahmavihārās or boundless qualities, which are seen as keys to cultivating an open, awakened state of being. Equanimity, in modern English, is defined as ‘evenness of mind especially under stress.’
In many mindfulness communities, Buddhist equanimity is interpreted as a sort of neutrality, a lack of preference about what happens to us: ‘I could get the job, or not. I could become wealthy, or I could remain poor. Either will provide opportunities for enlightenment.’ That kind of thing. Often, though, this receptivity gets mistaken for apathy, which can make us think that being numbed out and aloof is the ideal.