04 Feb What Causes suffering?
What causes suffering?
How can expectations cause us suffering?
What and how are expectations affecting your life?
For example: –
1. How much of your life?s suffering is caused by you comparing yourself to someone or an idealised person or their situation?
2. Do you have an expectation of how something?s should be like?
3. Has this expectation been brought on by childhood conditioning, peer pressure, family pressure, media message or personal desire?
4. Have you spent your life struggling to build ?the? dream?
5. Whilst in the process of building this dream how much of it are you juggling at the cost of your family, children, marriage or your health?
6. Are you causing suffering to yourself or others from looking for perfection? I.e. a perfect figure body!; perfect job, perfect Mr/Mrs Right?
7. Are you one of the elites that has everything and is now suffering from boredom, or spending too much time protecting or controlling what you have?
TIP:
Spiritual advisors say that we are conditioned to believe that we are in control of our lives and we can play God but in fact we have only limited control over the events in our lives.
We need to be aware of what the expectations are and how they affect us so that we can be flexible towards change.
Buddha said there is only one law in the universe that never changes ?that all things change and all things are impermanent?.
Our media in the West shows that life should offer us;
Extraordinary love
Extraordinary comfort
Ext? beauty
Ext?. wonder
Ext?. joy
Ext?. splendour
Our society clears from our vision the handicapped, the sick, the impoverished, the old so we see only the conditioned or distorted reality. In fact life is a rich and perplexing interplay of light and dark, success and failure, youth and age, pleasure and pain, life and death, health and sickness.
Circumstances are constantly falling apart one moment and only to come together the next.
As a Zen teacher said ?Everything is constantly losing its balance against a background of perfect balance?
When you start to live your life within the boundaries of expectations you begin to lose the ability to cultivate acceptance and make the most of opportunities arising from impermanence.
In short, you are less likely to get slapped in the face when something doesn’t happen the way you expected it to happen!
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