The Problem with Wellness

“The problem with getting well is that it sometimes doesn’t announce itself say the way that hurting yourself does in the first place.” — Geshe Michael Roach in the book How Yoga Works

Pain often happens suddenly, or at least quickly, and it announces itself very loudly. Generally we can’t mistake it. We almost always know when something happens that we don’t like, when we hurt ourselves or are hurt by someone else, when we feel disappointed or angry or otherwise unhappy. It lands on us, surrounds us, sometimes crushes us with its weight. Then it often lingers. It seems that rarely does the pain disappear as quickly or as dramatically as it appeared. Sometimes we don’t even notice when it has finally ceased and we are feeling better. The hangover from the suffering somehow remains, clouding our perception and preventing us from becoming aware that we are actually feeling better.

How can this be? We want to feel well and happy, don’t we? So how do we become so focused on pain and/or suffering that we fail to recognize wellness, peace, joy?

Our minds are already wired toward negative thinking, a survival instinct that allows us to quickly judge and react to a dangerous situation. When something happens that we don’t like, it becomes very big in our field of awareness. Our minds react with the fight/flight/freeze/or faint response, so we tend to do something, often without thinking about it. We work to push it away through avoidance, denial, or confrontation/aggression (flight or fight), or we attach ourselves to it and get stuck, often feeding it through resentment, righteousness, anger, victimization or feeling “wronged”, etc. (freeze or faint). Rarely, if ever, do we allow the negative or painful experience to just be there until it is ready to move on. Rarely, if ever, do we turn toward the experience and accept it merely as part of our humanness. Instead, our minds put all sorts of judgments and meaning onto it, feeding it in the process.

Instead of dissipating it then gets bigger. Instead of moving on when it’s ready, it lingers. We may even be feeling better, doing better, and becoming well, but we don’t see it. We see only the suffering and convince ourselves that we are still suffering, we have not become well.

It is true that recovery often takes time. It takes only a second to break a bone, but six to eight weeks to heal one. It takes only a second to break a heart but months or even years to heal it. Some of this is unavoidable, when we experience pain we require time to recover. The time we require, however, is often far less than the time we take.

Take the broken bone, for example. It may take six to eight week before the break in the bone has healed sufficiently to resume normal activity, but typically within just a few days much of the acute pain subsides. We can get around, accomplish many of our daily tasks relatively comfortably, etc. We continue to identify with the broken bone, however, because we are wearing some immobilizing device on it and are inconvenienced by it. This sometimes leads us to focus on the injury and the minor discomforts and inconveniences of it and ignore our experience of feeling much better and living a relatively normal life.

Similarly, with a broken heart, we may continue to carry the weight of the emotional hurt for a long time because we dwell in the past, when things were better or when things fell apart, and/or we focus on the future, fearing it will never be ok again. We therefore remove ourselves from the present and often miss what is happening now. If we are paying attention, however, we may also notice that we are able to smile and even laugh at times, we have moments of lightness, moments when the weight isn’t with us. It is only when our minds recall all of our beliefs around the hurt and/or our fears about the future that the weight returns.

Pain is almost always ready to leave us before we are ready to let it go. In our humanness it is much harder for us to accept peace, joy, love, and wellness than it is to attach ourselves to suffering. This is part of our human condition, part of the wiring of our brains. We need not exist under it’s weight, however. We can work to shift this negativity bias and accept more positive experience, more peace, joy, love and wellness into our lives.

We can allow wellness to announce itself as loudly as pain does.

We do this through awareness, through presence. The practice of awareness—of just being—allows us to experience our full range of experiences. Yes, we experience the pain, but instead of engaging in a struggle with it and/or attaching meaning to it, we just accept it as part of our humanness and simply observe it. That observation allows us to see it in its true state, which is often fluid rather than static. That is, pain often ebbs and flows, it intensifies and then dissipates. This awareness of pain’s changing nature is different from our experience of pain as a constant and intense presence. We begin to see pain differently, as it actually “is” rather than in the story we create about it, and with that observation, we begin to suffer less.

In our awareness, we also begin to notice our other experiences. Pain no longer masks them. We notice when the weight of the pain is lighter, or not there at all. We notice when we laugh, when we feel peace or joy, and how nice it feels, even if only for a moment. We notice as wellness begins to develop and evolve, and when it finally becomes more dominant an experience than the pain. And we allow ourselves to let go of the suffering when the pain is ready to go on its own.

Wellness and everything it includes—peace, joy, health, happiness, love—can be grown much the same way we allow ourselves to grow suffering. Wellness can be loud, even louder than hurt. It requires some work, yes, but many of us are already working to hang on to suffering. So it’s really just a matter of working in a different direction.

What if we shift that work and instead of exerting the effort to suffer we decide to grow our awareness of wellbeing?

Join us at Roots First and learn not only how to cultivate your own wellness, but also how to allow it to announce itself more loudly in your life.