One of my favorite thoughts to question is “I can’t stand it!!!”
It’s one of those simple, short, instant thoughts that comes to my mind if I really don’t like something that’s happening or something someone is saying.
Can you feel the sensations in your body that match the idea of not being able to stand it (whatever it is)? Tension, frustration, agony, fear!
A place that I’ve had this thought before is when I’ve had very little sleep and I’ve been awake many hours, and maybe I see that I’m probably going to be awake many more hours still….the thought comes in “I can’t stand it, I have to sleep!”
But if that were really true, I’d fall down right there, wherever I was, and start sleeping.
It turns out I always “make it” through the day. So far in life, I’ve always stood it, I’m still here.
Let’s take a harder circumstance. I was reading Byron Katie’s book this morning Who Would You Be Without Your Story? and there is a woman whose husband had left her to go be with another woman. The woman believed “I can’t stand it”.
I remember when I was waiting in the doctor’s office after getting a biopsy of a funny mole on my thigh. The doctor had checked the stitches from the biopsy and then said “why don’t you get dressed and then I’ll come back and we can talk about this”.
Suddenly, this wasn’t going the way most other doctor’s appointments went. We’re going to TALK about this? My mind was off like the race horses! Before knowing anything! Adrenaline, alertness, anticipation, intuition.
And, I also had The Work. I watched my mind within 10 minutes only, before the doctor even returned, question the belief “I can’t stand it, if it’s cancer”. It was cancer.
Katie writes “You believe you can’t stand it because you haven’t inquired. You haven’t enlightened yourself about how the mind works. So you have to live out I CAN’T STAND IT’. “
A friend who loves doing The Work emailed me a new title of a book he’s reading “The Guru Next Door” by Wendy Dolber. I live across the street from a bookstore (my personal addiction….we’ll talk about that later) so I’ll be looking for it today.
In the book is a list Wendy calls The Seven Understands of All Unhappiness. One of them is so simple:
“Believing something causes unhappiness is the very reason it seems to “cause” unhappiness”.
When I think about the things I can’t stand, I am CERTAIN that they cause unhappiness. Duh! Lack of sleep, lack of money, the cancer thingy on my leg, running out of gas in my car, not enough time, getting the flu, people dying, war, earthquakes.
Do these experiences REALLY cause unhappiness? What if they don’t? Almost hard to imagine, right?
But that’s what The Work brings. Even if it’s just the possibility that what I’m believing isn’t actually 100% true, and peace is possible, even in this “difficult” experience.
What if I CAN stand it? What if my life goes on? Or even if it doesn’t? Am I sure I couldn’t stand THAT?
So I watched what happened with the thing called cancer on my leg. I cried on the surgeon’s table as I was being wheeled in, but it was like my tears were not 100% serious. I thought about Jesus when he knew what was about to happen with the whole crucifixion situation and he said “God, do I HAVE to? Are you sure I can stand it?”
Now there’s just a big 3 inch scar on my leg where there was once 45 stitches. I like to say I got in a sword fight with a pirate. What if having a cancer tumor cut out of your thigh is just as exciting as getting stabbed by a pirate? It’s a pretty good story. The key word being ‘STORY’.
“We’re using mind to enlighten mind, because there isn’t anything else….When we realize that it’s our own mind that is causing our suffering, then The Work begins, then the fun begins. It’s living in a whole other polarity, a whole other realm. And what I love about it is we no longer believe that the world is causing our suffering, that it CAN cause our suffering. It can’t not ever—no chance of it.”—Byron Katie
Much Love, Grace