When any uncomfortable feeling arises within you, no matter how subtle or small it seems, notice how it always justifies its presence to you.
It immediately asks that you handover your attention -- and therefore your life -- to it, for it to take care of whatever problem it has perceived, on your behalf. It provides you with all very seemingly plausible solutions to “your” predicament (the uncomfortable feeling/disturbance itself); and more often than not, we end up acquiescing to its orders.
If you care enough to see this, you can then choose where to place your attention, but only by first realising that whatever this feeling is telling you is a lie. By knowing that you don’t have to listen to and follow what it’s telling you.
Whatever this sensation shows to you, has to feel very real, and provide you with a strong sense of self. It needs to do so in order to remain in control. This creates a strong sense of separateness, where it presents to you the thing or situation that is disturbing you, making you uncomfortable or afraid, on one side; and then, it shows you who “you” are, as that which is being disturbed on the opposite side. Here begins your inner conflict.
It paints the perfect scenario where it can promise you, if you obey its demands, with the antidote you seek for your pain. The pain that only manifested itself when its presence reared its head in your field of awareness; and only became a "problem" when you then handed your attention over to it.
At the moment this happens, remember if you can and will, that you have already been in that same situation more times than you can possibly count, and that not once has it delivered you with the lasting peace it always offers you… the proof of it being, that you still keep falling into the same situation.
It is also useful to remember, that whenever any feeling or negative state asks you to relinquish your attention to it, promising that it will take care of the situation once and for all, it is lying to you. Its objective to sound as convincing as possible, so you keep putting your life in its hands, so it can use your pain as way of keeping you captive, as its host and slave, through which it can maintain its existence.
Once you begin to be aware of this, you start seeing that no feeling can make you its slave, and live at your expense, unless you consent to it.
By Gibran Selman
