Each month I browse this magazine and see the dozens of ads and editorials that offer treatments for everything imaginable. It’s great that we live in a time that a service is available for almost everything you can have wrong with you, but… we can easily get the sense that no one is offering anything innovative or new. We can begin to lose hope as our society encourages us to medicate and try to “reason” our troubles away. Many people suffer and remain unhappy and unresponsive to the dozens of treatments being offered until they begin to feel that all these methods are all too similar and your own goals will remain unattained and your issues unresolved.
I feel that I’m something of a realist and this makes me seem to some more of a pessimist, because I believe something that Buddha said: “Life is suffering.” It has sporadic joys, but the majority of life is working hard and learning to cope with daily circumstances, conditions, pains, issues, etc. If we can begin to accept this precept, we can become free from the expectation that we are supposed to live these disproportionately “happy” lives and then we can find peace in the lives we do have. It is the expectation of joy and the desire to live better and pain free that lies at the core of our real suffering. We do not need to medicate, diagnose or resolve everything that makes us unhappy. We shouldn’t live with extraordinary suffering when we have treatable issues.
But we should learn to manage and minimize them.
We should try to resolve them so that we can live life with less suffering. And when those sporadic moments of joy come around, we should be accessible to them!
Buddha also said we lack “right understanding.” Right understanding, along with clinical, non-drug, modalities like life-coaching, consciousness training, hypnosis, biofeedback and others, can open our minds to a more profound attitude towards life. We can apply the teachings of great sages and spiritual teachers into our lives, along with strong intellectual analysis and use modern techniques to enhance them; something old and something new. Don’t allow yourself to be seduced by the conventional same old methods to change your life. Reach beyond.
Scott Spackey is a State Certified Addiction Counselor, Life-Coach, Hypnotherapist, and Interventionist. For more information, please call 661-299-1966, email: Scott@Life-Mind.com and visit www.LIFE-MIND.com.