The Experience of You.
Many years ago, I was ‘dumped’ by a young woman who I was very much ‘in love’ with. We had discussed possibly getting married, and although we never made anything official, we were of the age where things could have gone that way very easily.
When I finally came to the understanding that she was seeing someone else, I was devastated, and for some time after that she still plagued my thoughts and feelings.
And it didn’t have to be that way at all.
Because I was still very much ‘in the experience’ of life, rather than understanding that life was an experience that was happening to me. If that sounds difficult to understand, let me try to explain it in a way that might make sense.
Because this is a huge principle that you need to understand in order to move forward.
There were two things happening at that moment that were not absolutely linked. One was the experience of ‘being dumped’, and the other was the meaning I was taking from ‘the experience of being dumped’.
The two are very different, yet for most people, these are intertwined events that are inseparable until they have had a little practice in the art of ‘non-identifying’.
Which, put very simply, is the art of accepting the experience without accepting any definition of you.
Because I was as yet unaware that the two could be separated, I took the breakup very hard, accepting without question the meaning that her breaking up with me was a sign of ‘my lack of value, or acceptability’.
Of course, no-one likes to have their dreams of a perfect future wrecked, but because I was identifying through the events that were occurring, the breakup was significantly more intense than it had to be.
Had I not identified through the breakup, then the experience would have happened to me, but not been ‘about me’.
I know it sounds like a semantic difference, but it’s really not. I can tell you that I was identifying through the break up because at the time I entered into the relationship with the her I had a poorly defined sense of self, and even less of a concept of self worth.
I was identifying through the relationship because it helped me feel good about myself, and that made it all the worse for me when it didn’t work out.
The less I ‘need’ something from an experience, the easier it is for me not to identify with it.
And that’s really the key of living peacefully… to have made peace with your soul and to live life without ‘needing’ to take anything from the experience, knowing that you are enough without anything happening to you or because of you.
When you reach that moment, you’ll realize that everything that happens to you is not a definition of your value, but an experience to be en’joy’ed.
And then you will find peace beyond your deepest understanding.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings