Learning to Stay

Let’s begin by noticing that painful thoughts and feelings have a quality of uncertainty. Not knowing what will happen if you don’t do something about them and the situation you’re in right now triggers an urgency to act. The emergency comes as an intense thought or feeling that lures you in. You bite it and get hooked. Feeling tense, tight, and rigid, not wanting to be there, and wanting to do something quickly to get off the hook is what being hooked feels like.

Staying with Uncertainty

In the Staying with Uncertainty exercise, you’ll practice staying with uncertainty, holding, and making room within you for whatever painful thoughts and feelings might arise without moving away as you might habitually do. Staying still, you begin to loosen up and soften your grip on the problem-solving approach to pain, and you realize you don’t fall into a black hole.

When you quiet yourself down and focus on (and stay present with) your breathing happening here and now, you’ll notice that your mind repeatedly wanders away and always comes back. After all, how would you know that your mind wandered away to thoughts and feelings if you didn’t always return to something here and now, like breathing in the Staying with Uncertainty exercise?

Staying with your breathing does not mean you’re not thinking and feeling. Your mind is busy telling you all sorts of things all the time. You can already listen, pay attention, be present, and set aside what your mind tells you to do. For example, remember a time when you were talking with someone important to you, and your mind unexpectedly threw out a thought like, “Slap the person” or something like that? What did you do? You probably didn’t act on it and wondered where that thought came from. In your mind’s massive network of thoughts, something about that moment was linked to the words “Slap the person.”

In watching your thoughts and feelings in a situation, pay attention with openness—allowing everything that arises, curiosity—questioning the helpfulness of everything, flexibility—observing without clinging to anything, compassion—being kind to yourself, and patience—letting everything unfold naturally.

When painful thoughts and feelings show up, notice them, be patient, and get curious about them. In that moment of discomfort, know there’s a good chance they’ll trigger your mind to think, “Get away. Do what you’ve done before. It will work. It will make you feel better.” Does it? Will it be this time? The best you can say is yes, briefly. However, somewhere you know, it won’t. Yet the urge to do the usual thing is still in your mind and body. If you do it, you’ll feel better. In the long run, you’re just strengthening habits that keep you stuck in your pain.

Trying to move away from inescapable thoughts and feelings cripples you from living your values. The fact is, painful thoughts and feelings come and go. They have a quality of impermanence.

Watching Impermanence

In the Watching Impermanence exercise, you’ll practice watching your thoughts and feelings come and go and noticing when they pull you away from your experience. You’ll become aware of their impermanence. So relax wholeheartedly into the fact that things change.

After doing the Watching Impermanence exercise, maybe you’ll notice that the nature of thoughts and feelings is that they won’t always feel pleasant. You’ll experience unpleasant things in life despite your natural tendency to seek lasting thoughts and feelings that feel good. Painful thoughts and feelings will come and go. Sometimes they hang around longer than other times, especially when they lure you in, you bite, get hooked, and do the habitual thing to move away. This aggravates the pain and keeps you stuck in it.

Swinging with Your Feelings

Feeling stuck in pain is like being trapped waist-deep in the middle of a smelly, muddy swamp. Your thoughts and feelings seem to bog you down. The key is walking through the swamp because it stands between you and the direction you want to travel in life. Getting muddy, feeling icky, smelling bad, and walking through the weeds are all in the service of living a life guided by your values.

When you’re willing to have that stuck feeling as you live your values, it begins to change by itself because that’s the nature of all feelings. Staying with it might feel like you’re swinging back to feeling worse. When you give it enough time, you’ll eventually swing forward to feeling better.

In the Swinging with Your Feelings exercise, you’ll work on moving into and out of your feelings to restore the natural swing of living life in which painful thoughts and feelings come and go.

Some Final Words

As you get better at staying with your pain, you’ll notice that sometimes thoughts and feelings go away. At times, you get a lot of distance from them. At other times, you feel better. And sometimes, all these things happen. However, these things won’t always happen. You might get little or no distance from your thoughts and feelings. You might feel worse or experience no difference in how you’re feeling. Overall, the exercises aim to help you get better at noticing and being aware. It’s not to feel better. In the long run, though, people tend to feel better with practice and less caught up in painful thinking and feeling.

With practice, you’ll also get better at tracking the connections and interactions among thoughts, feelings, and situations. You’ll notice thoughts and feelings for what they are (only thoughts and feelings) and where they are (only inside you). The alternative would be feeling wobbly, trembly, and tingly, with your heart beginning to pound without noticing the thoughts or situation triggering them. Then all of a sudden, you think something terrible is about to happen, and you have a panic attack. Thinking and feeling reinforce each other, generating more painful thoughts and feelings. Remembering to come back to the present moment keeps you from staying hooked.

In summary, here are five essential dos and don’ts of staying with your pain:

Dos

• Welcome and greet your thoughts and feelings with appreciation, kindness, and care.
• Pay attention to your thoughts and feelings with openness, curiosity, flexibility, compassion, and patience.
• Practice to get better at noticing.

Don’ts

• Try to avoid, get rid of, or escape from your thoughts, feelings, or situations.
• Think you already know what thoughts and feelings will show up in the situation.
• Try to feel better.