Dealing with Suffering — You Are Not Your Pain!!!

“Hey, I’m Paul Krismer. I’m your happiness expert and this week’s video is all about how to cope with all the crap that’s going on in our lives. Like, it is never-ending, and it tests our ability to be resilient, to bounce back. And let’s face it, we’ve got the pandemic, we’ve got political chaos, and we have, of course, our usual lives; economic concerns, financial, relationship, you name it. It’s a lot to deal with, and I want to talk this week about how to manage that in a fashion that’s, to a degree, easy. I mean, let’s face it, we want easy in our culture. Our Western culture, in particular, we’re not good at suffering. So this week, I’m going to give you some easy solutions.”

“As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. So we’ve got a lot of suffering going on, right? It’s just, that’s the reality of the world right now. And it’s hard. Like, I mean, no one wants to suffer. We hate suffering, and we’re impatient with it. And I could give you tips, like I give every week, about one technique or another. And you know, I want you to overcome your obstacles. I want your reality to be different, the things that hurt you and give you emotional pain to not feel so bad. But the first lesson is always that the obstacle is the obstacle. The suffering is the optional component in all of this. That the obstacle is just reality. It’s the stuff that’s external to ourselves. It’s the pandemic, and the economic concern, and all that kind of stuff, and it is simply real.”

“Our first obligation to be good to ourselves is to accept reality and simply say, ‘Hey, this thing that’s going on in the world, there ain’t nothing I can do about it. And if there is anything I can do about it, I want to think about it very mindfully.’ I want to say, ‘Oh, here’s the economic consequences of the pandemic, my job’s in jeopardy. Here’s some things I need to do and plan it out. I’m going to update my resume, I’m going to make a few contacts with friends, whatever it is.’ Objectively go and deal with reality. The problem is, of course, that we tend to over-deal with it. That our minds continually play games with ourselves where we’re constantly ruminating on these things that we’re worried about, and we spin in kind of negative cycles about the same stuff over and over again.”

“Oh, gee, I really am worried about the job. What happens if I lose this work? And oh my goodness, I really need to make those contacts. And we obsessively think about the same stuff, whatever it is, our relationship issues, our finances, our concerns about our health. All those things that are the obstacles to happiness. They’re real, but let’s deal with them in a mindful way. Ah, here’s the obstacle. I’m taking it on. Now, the best way to do this, of course, is through mindfulness. And I’ve got tons of other previous videos about mindfulness. And David will click some links below, and we’ll do another. You can pursue some stuff about mindfulness. But this week, I want it to be easier than being a Zen monk in a cave somewhere. Kidding, it’s not that hard. But couldn’t we simply take us away from those horrible, hurtful mind games by being distracted? Wouldn’t that be easy? Just a good, simple, positive distraction?”

“You know, it can be almost anything. But I encourage us not to turn to what Westerners typically do for the easiest ways to become distracted. Booze, drugs, mindless, exploitative sex, by too much junk food, obsessive watching of poor-quality TV, all that kind of stuff, I’m not recommending it. But there are distractions we can have that would be really, really effective. You know, learning a new skill would be a really particularly good one. Learn to knit, or learn how to use Microsoft Excel, whatever your interest could take you into, and then exploit that and learn lots about it. Personal growth, professional growth, that’s a perfect time to do this. And if you pursue it far enough, it starts becoming the distraction for your life, even outside of the formal time when you’re pursuing this growth. So that you begin to think about it outside of the formal study time, or you dream about it.”

“I watched a wonderful documentary on Netflix just the other night. It was called ‘My Octopus Teacher’. It was a strange little film about a guy who’s kind of in a midlife personal crisis in his life. And we don’t hear much detail about what that was, but we can imagine, relationship, money, the usual stuff. And he is a diver in the intertidal pools close to where he lives, and he discovers this octopus one day underneath the water, and he sees where his little den is. It’s not a very big thing, it’s about yay big, and he becomes obsessed with it. Every single day for almost a year, he dives in there and hangs out with his octopus. And he loves it. They have this relationship, the octopus learns to trust him, and kind of gloms onto his body sometimes. It’s very, very beautiful film, and the camera work is amazing.”

“And he begins to obsess about the octopus even when he’s not in the water with the octopus. He starts researching, reading on the internet everything you could possibly want to know about this particular species of octopus. And then he even starts to dream and think like an octopus. And his, the octopus, its vulnerabilities, its concerns, its pursuit of food and security, and all those things, he starts to see life through the eyes and emotions of that octopus. Or at least, he thinks he does. And his obsessive thinking, instead of being about the problems and perils in his life, becomes the life of this octopus. And it’s beautiful, and he talks about in this documentary how his life heals. The teaching that this octopus gives him. And of course, the octopus isn’t doing a whole lot of active teaching. The documentary makes that clear. It’s not the octopus that teaches him, it’s him being distracted, getting outside of those mind games of spiraling about the negative stuff in his life, and having another preoccupation, that allows then that when he deals with the real things, the obstacles in his life, he’s more objective, more mindful, on task, being realistic, and actually conquering those things. And meanwhile, the obsessive parts of his life, the mind games that we all play with ourselves, he’s playing with this obsession with the octopus. Does that make sense?”

“So find your own distraction. Find a healthful, wonderful distraction. Go look at that video, we’re at it on Netflix. Or go check out the mindful links that are in the comments below. But one way or another, find ways to get out of your routines of thinking about the stuff that’s hurting you emotionally all the time. Does that make sense? I hope it does. Hey, if you like this kind of content, click the like button. If you want content like this every Sunday morning, click the subscribe button, and you’ll get a little bit of happiness every Sunday morning. Thanks for watching. Bye for now.”