Are YOU Ready to MAKE a BREAK?-2

Are YOU Ready to MAKE a BREAK?-2

Breaking DOWN

We hate it when the car breaks down. Yet everyday we have many little personal emotional breakdowns. These are moments when we stop functioning, not completely, but efficiently and positively! These are the low points of our day when we believe, and therefore feel, that we have been affected by some event or person, or perhaps by some news that comes our way. One brief email can do the trick…sometimes! Such moments can range from feelings of a quiet anxiety at one end of the spectrum to utter devastation or monumental rage, down the other end! In between are all the various forms of breakdowns what we call ‘stress’. We can tolerate these moments for so long. But if they grow in frequency and intensity then our many little breakdowns tend to become both visible and tangible and they may grow into a somewhat traumatic big breakdown!

While this kind of breakdown seems to be a negative event it usually contains both a message and an opportunity to look closely at how we are living our life. It invites us to ‘break down’, as in ‘examine closely’, all the thought patterns and behaviours, beliefs and tendencies, that are causing us to suffer, and to find the ones which are causing us to...break down!

Breaking UP

For many of us it’s usually a significant breakdown, nervous or otherwise, that forces us into reflection and a self-analyses of all the internal factors which are causing our mental and emotional unhappiness. Even if it’s only for a few moments here and a few moments there, eventually we will turn to examine our emotional exhaustion. We are likely to notice that the root cause of ALL such moments of stress, sorrow or suffering, regardless of their depth or intensity, is some form of attachment. It may become obvious to some, but not everyone, that all our stressful feelings contain one or other of the three emotional families - sadness, anger or fear, and sometimes a combination of all three. Each of these emotions, and their respective family members, can always be traced back to a common cause, which is always something we are attached to, clinging to, grasping tightly, in our own minds.

Just as we sometimes ‘break up’ with someone, so we will need to ‘break up’ with all the things we are attached to if we want to restore calm, strength and wellness to our being. Unsurprisingly few of us realize this, because it’s hard to see that to be attached to anyone or anything is actually an attempt to fragment ones self! Which is ultimately impossible. But it’s what we all learn to do and, as a consequence, we find it hard to see the connection between that and our stress/unhappiness.

Being non-attached can also seem hard because we have learned that detachment also implies some kind of loss. Just thinking about it can even trigger the creation of sadness! But in reality detachment means setting ones self free internally. There is no loss. On the contrary there is an increase in both our availability and our capacity to care. It simply means changing our relationship with our...attachments! It’s a shift from ‘this/they’ are MINE to ‘this’ comes into my life for use, and ‘they’ come into my life to give me an opportunity to give of my self’. Both ‘this’ and ‘they’ will, like everything and anyone, come to pass. And pass they do!

It’s also in the process of restoring this inner freedom that we are likely to notice how attachment underpins dependency. It’s almost the same. It is both revealing and liberating when we see how all our desires and expectations arise from our ‘learned dependencies’. Once we see and realize that it’s our own desires and expectations that are causing our moments of unhappiness, and not what others and the world are doing, then almost all the dots are joined.

Om Namah Shivay