How can you know yourself?

Life and difficulties go hand in hand. Some problems are inherent to our own life, hidden within our family history or caused by seriously traumatic experiences, along with these there are the difficulties resulting from our mutual human differences.

At a deeper more subconscious level we deal with still more issues. We are either not at all or maybe just barely aware of keeping ourselves upright in a changing world.  Grasping to steady ourselves while knowing deep inside that we will unavoidably lose everything.  Yet we do our best to hold on, trying to exist while we deny the temporariness of it all, including our own impermanence. Nothing, material or immaterial is more relative than ownership. Our lives and life are paradoxical.

We do not want all these difficulties so we avoid them by renouncing them, consciously or subconsciously hiding in denial of ourselves – hiding in the ego created in our minds.

We do not really understand ourselves, nor do we realize how our mind works. We build up a lonely and superficial life by negating our problems and turning away from them.  We not only renounce those issues but the pain flowing from them as well. We want happiness not pain, yet we do not know how to achieve it. We look for happiness in the wrong way and in the wrong place.

Our problems and our happiness go hand in hand, they belong together. By letting our troubles in, by recognizing them and by loving them we can shape them into an experience, making room for the pain. By letting that happen we learn that we do not need to renounce or disown our problems or pains. By letting them in and turning them into an experience we can relax and feel happy. That is how we become friends with what was first our enemy.

Thus we can discover that this is the only way of knowing ourselves, knowing our strengths, knowing the powerful qualities necessary to find and fathom our own depths.

That is how we get to understand not just ourselves but our fellow men as well. When the need dissolves to renounce and deny our own problems, the need to do so with the people around us will fade away as well. We will be able to understand our fellow men better still, we will be more patient and we will be able to forgive. We will be able to accept them as they are. We will be able to love them.