A Quote by Lee L Jampolsky
Becoming less focused on the past and future and not resisting the moment is how to overcome fear, physical pain, and all suffering.
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Pain is physical; suffering is mental. Beyond the mind there is no suffering. Pain is essential for the survival of the body, but none compels you to suffer. Suffering is due entirely to clinging or resisting; it is a sign of our unwillingness to move on, to flow with life.
Whether we fear pain and suffering or not, pain and suffering will come to everyone. Why not keep our minds focused on where we want to go?
All around us people are suffering from stress, fear, sorrow, pain, and fear of future suffering, especially death. None of these are natural to us, because we are eternal spirit souls. Humanity has been controlled through the fear of death.
Do not look back,
No one knows how the world ever began.
Do not fear the future, Nothing lasts forever.
If you dwell on the past or future,
You will miss the moment.
Looking to the material world for the satisfaction of our inner needs is the source of much fear. All fear is, in essence, fear of the future. We are afraid of things that have not yet happened, but which if they did might bring us pain, suffering, or some other discomfort - or stand in the way of some future contentment. And we are afraid that circumstances that are already causing us displeasure may continue in the future.
What I find compelling is the moment in which people realize, with suffering and pain, that in the past there was a time when they were happy, because back then the present and the future coincided - they were one and the same thing.
Pain is not the same as suffering. Left to itself, the body discharges pain spontaneously, letting go of it the moment that the underlying cause is healed. Suffering is pain that we hold on to. It comes from the mind’s mysterious instinct to believe that pain is good, or that it cannot be escaped, or that the person deserves it.
Fear is the anticipation of the pain in the future. Anger is the remembrance of pain in the past. Hostility is wanting to get even.
With each passing moment I'm becoming part of the past. There is no future for me, just the past steadily accumulating.
I marvel now that it was not obvious how inextricable suffering and fear are. It was not until fear left that I noticed, slowly, how it seemed to have taken suffering with it. It took a while to figure out that (for me, anyhow) suffering is mostly caused by fear-not by the circumstances themselves, but by my response to them.
Fear is when we're thinking about the past or thinking about the future, two things that do not exist. If we stay in the moment, do our best in the moment, enjoy the moment, there is no fear.
To diminish the suffering of pain, we need to make a crucial distinction between the pain of pain, and the pain we create by our thoughts about the pain. Fear, anger, guilt, loneliness and helplessness are all mental and emotional responses that can intensify pain.
A truly successful person knows how to overcome the past, use the present, and prepare for the future-but unless we can first surmount the past, we cannot effectively cope with either the present or the future.
We human beings have enormous difficulty in focusing on the present; we always thinking about what we did, about how we could have done it better.... or else we think about the future, about what we're going to do.... But at this precise moment, you also realize that you can change your future by bringing the past into the present. Past and future only exist in our mind. The present moment, though, is outside of time, it's Eternity.... It isn't what you did in the past the will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
As a religious problem, the problem of suffering is, paradoxically, not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer, how to make of physical pain, personal loss, worldly defeat, or the helpless contemplation of others' agony something bearable, supportable- something as we say, sufferable.
Healing depends on listening with the inner ear - stopping the incessant blather, and listening. Fear keeps us chattering - fear that wells up from the past, fear of blurting out what we really fear, fear of future repercussions. It is our very fear of the future that distorts the now that could lead to a different future if we dared to be whole in the present.
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