The Power of Words
Names don’t matter. You can call an event either “bad” or “hard” and its nature remains the same. Right? Wrong!
Whatever pleasure and pain that happens in the world happens within the confines of the minds of its experiencers. Nothing outside of the mind is evaluated. Suffering is a construct of the mind (as pleasure is). Now, I have done this simple conscious change from categorizing events as “good and bad” to “easy and hard”, and it has changed the quality of my experiences drastically.
Recently I got Covid and it was not a light one. I couldn’t get out of bed for 10 days and experienced all sorts of symptoms during those days, some of which collided with my past issues and made me very uncomfortable. A big one was the clogging of my ears which made me claustrophobic and a bit panicky.
However, none of it was ‘bad’ as I saw it. It was a needed experience in the rainbow of experiences I am here in this world to have. Even the claustrophobic experience came with its blessings. Through that experience, I was able to cope with the fear when I couldn’t remove its cause, which made me thrilled (the fear gradually became less and less severe to the point I no more felt it).
I had other achievements through this difficult experience as well and that’s what difficult experiences are for: to help us grow to a point where we can pass them.
Now, if I had called the covid incident a bad, terrible experience, I wouldn’t keep myself open to see its blessings, I wanted it to just be over without me second-glancing over it. But when I see it as a difficult experience, I don’t necessarily want it to be over. I kind of see myself in a challenge that I can come out of, with victory and growth and for that, I want to extract all the lessons that I can get from it. Therefore, there’s not so much escaping or avoidance.
Life is a series of easy and tough experiences. When I don’t see them as good and bad ones, I do not see the need to skip or fast forward the bad ones, because I can see that I am here to experience the full spectrum of life, not a selective set of experiences I consider good. And that perspective is only attained when I start rephrasing the narrative of my life, and mean it.
