Q. I get easily angry and hurt when someone insults me. How can I avoid this?
Why do you try to avoid it? To suppress pain, anger, humiliation will only cause it to stay in your system in a repressed form. Suppressed emotions can be dangerous - a little anger, a small feeling of hurt, can fester over time into a deep and lasting hatred.
Instead, try accepting your emotion without judging yourself. Are you feeling hurt? Right, now enter completely into the feeling of hurt. Don't avoid it, don't reject it. Don't sympathise with yourself either, don't direct it against the person who hurt you - simply watch the emotion as it plays in your system. This may take a while - maybe a few hours, even a few days And then you will see a transformation you never imagined. After all, emoton is energy, tremendous energy. Just how long can so much raw energy circulate in your system? The moment you accept your pain with no rejection, welcoming its role in your life, the whole quality of pain changes. The same energy that was pain, anger, suffering is transformed into the blessed emotions of love and bliss.
This is Compassion, the silent force that moves in each of us, the force that transforms the ugly into the beautiful. And Compassion brings its own rewards.
Difficult to believe? It will certainly be, till you experience it yourself. Give it a chance!
Q. Why do love and pain always go hand in hand? I try to give a lot of freedom to my partner in my relationships, but just end up getting used.
In the first place, isn't your idea of 'giving freedom' to your beloved a very wrong one? Love itself implies giving the other total freedom, unconditional freedom. To say that you are giving a certain amount of freedom to the other (whatever you consider necessary!) itself shows that you are holding back something in your giving.
It is natural to want to possess your beloved - that is the play of the ego. It is difficult to imagine that your beloved may need space and time away from you, isn't it! You try to do the right thing - by 'giving freedom' to your lover - but when she actually uses that freedom, you end up feeling exploited. Honestly, you never expected that she would never use that freedom to do her own thing, or to be with someone else, did you?
Don't make the mistake of generalising: 'Every time I give freedom in my relationships, I get used.' Are you sure the fault is not yours as well? The reason that love usually brings with it so much pain is that lovers unknowingly force each other into the golden cage of their own expectations. But true love can never blossom in captivity. You try and imprison your lover, and she does the same, time after time - till you end up feeling that love is so much misery that perhapsit is better not to love at all. But once you close yourself to Love, what is left?
Love can be a door to joy and freedom, or it can become a living hell. To experience love as pain is to miss the whole point of Love.
There's a saying: 'If you love someone, set her free. If she's yours, she'll come back to you; if she doesn't come back, it means she never was yours anyway.' Try following that - not just in your romantic attachments, but in all your relationships!
Q. We in Bharat have been brought up on the concept of 'karma', necessary suffering. Is suffering really essential in our lives?
To start with, it will help to realise that suffering is not a state of life, it is a state of mind. It is not an event in your life - it is your response to some event. Whether you suffer or not in a particular situation depends entirely on your reaction to that situation.
When do you undergo suffering? When you fall ill? When your neighbour gets a new car? When your boyfriend / girlfriend leaves you for someone else?
Well, suppose you decided to just accept these situations without anger or resentment. Just as they are, so be it. Would you still suffer as much? After all, there is nothing inherently painful about your neighbour getting a new car. Even if there is pain in the moment, as when a loved one leaves, you cannot wish it away. Try to accept the inevitability of the moment, without reaction. It is ONLY your negative response to an experience that allows it to hurt you. Don't you see, no one or nothing can make you suffer without your silent permission?
Make a habit of witnessing experiences minus your personal judgement. Learn to recognise with clarity the causes of your suffering - the obvious and the subtle. The ability to do this will come, not in a day but certainly through practice.
Once of the most deeply hidden reasons for suffering is: you could be enjoying it! For example, falling ill can become a source of pleasure if it fetches you the attention and care you have been craving. Examine why it sometimes gives you pleasure to inflict pain on yourself, or on others. Is there a better channel through which you can receive the same pleasure without the suffering? Become Aware - this is the first step.
The second is to Accept totally the Here and Now - without questions and without reaction. Awareness with Acceptance this is the only way out of suffering.
The second part of the question - is suffering essential?
Yes, in a way it is. Because suffering can be a powerful catalyst to growth. Just like a seed first has to rupture before a plant can grow and blossom, intense suffering can break down the defenses of your ego, leaving you open and vulnerable to existence. With your usual thought patterns shattered, you begin to see things as they actually are. You begin to recognize a subtle distance betwen you and the pain - that it is not 'your' pain, someting intrinsic to you. In fact, pain is simply the response you've
chosen to that particular situation. And once you see that, how can you suffer anymore? In consciously accepting your pain, you truly let go of it.
Suffering is not necessarily the key to bliss. But if you learn your lesson well, suffering can certainly open your eyes to the unreality of suffering. It can teach you how unneccessary it is to suffer at all. This is what I call 'necessary suffering'!
Q. You say the dropping of pain can bring bliss - but bliss too leads to pain when it ceases.