Sometimes it is just good to be angry, or cry without having to stop because you are suppose not to? Yes. We burn the bridge before we even cross it. We want peace, but won’t allow ourselves to be at peace with what disturbs us.

When you seek to deny anything about you, you make yourself your own enemy and create an endless well of conflict in your life. When you let yourself be, you will find what you were trying to control often stops, because it was never you. It arose from that conflict, that effort to control.  Short of an organic issue (and it isn’t even false necessarily for them), when you allow yourself to feel “totally fucked up”, there is peace in that. As the emotion plays through, you often see something that shows you more of why you felt that way, and it arms you to deal next time. You don’t learn to deal with pain by avoiding it. We can’t teach doctors to heal by never letting them touch the sick or injured. How are we to recover or find any peace if we can’t be hurt? If pain is forbidden, I promise you will become quite attached to pain. If thinking is forbidden, you will get quite tied up in your thoughts. What you forbid enslaves you more than what you permit.

It is the same in relationships.  Sometimes when it really gets bad, as bad as it possibly can be, only then it really gets better. Because you don’t pretend it to be all “ok”, and you really open up for the problem. Accepting what’s wrong.

How are we to recover, or find any peace if we can’t hurt others? It seems that having no foundation in “what is controlled” could get out of control? Kind of the way the world is now, lots of war? War can be controlled by a vested interest in peace. When people want peace badly they don’t seek to control war. They seek to foster peace. “When you push the universe, the universe pushes back” quote author unknown. In Taoism they say that which goes against the Tao cannot stand. All wars end inevitably and so does all control.

So maybe we can expect both peace and war as a fact, yet participate in neither? Yes you can, that is what the Buddha taught was the secret to freedom, and he said was the source of his wisdom. Not that he was for or against anything, but that he saw that he was neither. He did not identify with it. He did embrace teaching. He did seek to promote insight into the potential for liberation, but didn’t even identify with it.

Then to accept the negative as being part of us is a way to personal acceptance? Yes, while you have to fight your negative, you will be stuck fighting your negative. Fighting it feeds it. You feel it needs to be fought, needs to be controlled, and this makes it very real in your mind. Often more real than any virtues you have. All our sins tend to be remembered, and most passionately by ourselves.

To accept, and not fight it can lessen it? Yes. Because for one, as you stop fighting it you have more energy and time. You might discover that there was something more important that you really needed to do. You might have no time for that old negative.

What if you as a child very stubbornly decided to do good, and to stay pure, but can’t live up to it of course? That’s hard. The childs nature was to be good. The child mistook being good for being other than they are. That child was likely very good but got lost in being good. Good is not something you can do. In peace good comes. Patanjali said that for them who abstain from false identification, the fruits of good acts arise of their own. Patanjali, and the old yogi sage Lao-Tzu saw the same, that we are not “bad” and need to be “good”. There is no such conflict.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~