What’s common between a daughter-in-law devastated by her mother-in-law’s behaviour, a man who cannot bear the boredom of his work anymore, a parent who is terribly stressed because his child refuses to study, a man who cannot believe he has lost his wife so suddenly, and a woman who is overwhelmed because she has been diagnosed with breast cancer?

As I see it, a few things …

The situation is grave

It has taken the joy out of life

Most of the day and sometimes a good part of the night is spent in thinking about the problem and thinking how to resolve it

A sense of being stuck, and trapped- a feeling that I cannot get out of this…

Do you feel like this about some situation of your life?

Are you spending a great deal of time coming to terms with it, trying to find a solution for it? If yes… this is for you…

 

Here’s the solution: STOP FINDING A SOLUTION

I know this is difficult to even entertain, leave alone accept such a statement. After all if you don’t find a solution to your problem, who will? And yet I say stop finding a solution.

Finding the Solution may be the Problem

You may have spent a great many days – I would like to believe it is even weeks, months and years sometimes- trying to SOLVE this. Do you believe that in all this time you couldn’t really come up with a solution? That a solution is there somewhere but you cannot find it?

How often after all this extensive thinking, you have landed exactly at square one? Back at the problem? Hasn’t that happened too often for comfort?

And still you try the same technique again and again and yet again!

Have you asked yourself why?

 

Why do we keep thinking “SOLUTION”?

Why do we keep thinking “solution”, even when all our efforts have met with no result? Why do we walk this same path repeatedly? And there is a fairly simple answer to this…

The answer is that we do not want to believe that this is it… That we have to stay in this problem space for a good period of time.

This answer is not something unheard of and yet we do not let it occur to us, or if it does we do not accept it. Our mind’s chatter tells us how can you accept defeat? You will never be able to live happily in the middle of this problem. You have to get out of this problem or somehow get this problem out of your life.

Your days and weeks and months have passed by thinking of this

 

Time to face stuff

Sometimes we have to understand this is how it is, to let go of trying to control situations beyond our control and settle down to a greater acceptance.

The problem we are facing is a small black hole in our lives, it isn’t our life.

There is more to life, but we have to make a very conscious effort to look beyond our difficulties. This effort requires less worry and more courage.

The courage to stand and face life for what it delivers…to stop obsessing over resolution when there is none, to recognize when you have worried enough over something and to move on and make friends with the problem that you are facing.

Have you observed that when you make peace with something, it bothers you less?

When you can’t stand dirty or noisy neighbours, every piece of dirt, every sound bothers you. You react to everything, because you want to solve it. If you accept the dirt, make friends with the noise and focus on your life and try to move on, you are able to rest.

 

I never said accepting the problem is easy, but it is certainly a direction to start working at. Instead of making the effort you make on correcting something that seems out of your control or that is not getting corrected in such a long time, why not try to be with it. To hold it closer and to accept it?

I will soon write something on how to go about acceptance with mindfulness. Until then try to practice this one. All the best!

 

Post contributed by: Sadia Raval