Avoiding Pleasure and Pain

The toggle between pleasure and pain creates a prison world.  Seeking, seeking, seeking a safe space that is harmonious, known, comfortable.  This seems so practical and is completely understandable and yet is an illusion.  Life is pain and pleasure.  When you resist either of these you create more suffering, more uncomfortable sensations than is actually necessary.  Let us say that you are going through a heart wrenching break up and the pain is so immense you continue to avoid feeling the intensity of heartbreak.  The feelings are uncomfortable, scary, and uncontrollable–you push them down so you can live.  The thought is I control my emotions, my emotions don’t control me!  And yet you are controlled by the fear of feeling your emotions.  This fear that you indulge in creates resistance to what is and that resistance is dis-ease or suffering.  We aren’t taught that the unknown path of accepting what is might actually be the most comfortable path.  The prison world that we create for ourselves can seem so safe because it is predictable and emotionally dampened.  If we admit that we are part of the chaos of life then we would need to be open to experiencing it and relinquish the walls of confined control.  We would have to own that we are actually here, here full of pain and pleasure including all of the damned sins and innocent purity.  The only safe space is inside the here and now.