Have you ever experienced a great suffering, a loss?
Suffering is a contrite desire. It´s a desire for things to happen in a certain way or for people to behave as you would like them to, and when they don't, the desire clashes with reality, and from this friction arises suffering, that is, the problem arises in our insistence that something different from reality happens.
We tend to focus too much on what we consider that we lack, we feed thoughts of lack and we are usually drawing goals about things to achieve in the future and this makes it difficult for us to pay attention to what we are, what we feel and think in our day to day life.
Unfortunately, we usually start to value the importance of living in the present moment and valuing our time when an event calls our attention, such as, for example, the death of a close person, the breakup of a relationship, a job loss, a catastrophic investment, a pandemic... among many others. In my case it was a traffic accident, in fact two actually, the first one led me to make a radical change in the accelerated way I was living my life and the second one I considered a reminder (but these are stories for another publication).
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The point I want to get at with this is that sometimes we forget that being happy is only achieved in the here and now, and for me, it has nothing to do with what you have or what you expect from situations and others, but rather a process of inner cultivation and personal development.
When we generate a lot of expectations about what you want or desire from others, your family, your partner, your environment, the State, and a long etc., what we really do is to accumulate frustrations, since we can hardly control that everyone responds positively to our aspirations in the desired time.
If I have expectations regarding what another person will do for me and we do not express our desires, if that person does not meet our "demands" we get frustrated and problems start, I would dare to say that most of the conflicts in couple relationships arise from this cause, from unfulfilled expectations, from accumulating in our mind desires that we pretend to be fulfilled by the other.
"I wish he would take me to the movies", "I wish he would bring me breakfast in bed", "I want him to take care of the kids for a day", "I wish to watch my game without interruptions" ...
What other wishes or expectations would you add?
Frustration is nothing more than a feeling of failure or disappointment that overwhelms us when we expect to fulfill our desire and we do not achieve it, that is, it's a dissonance between the expectations created and the real facts, and we experience this as a failure, which leads us to this state of frustration and consequently to suffering. It depends on each person the reaction to this emotional shock that occurs, which can manifest itself with emotions such as anger, sadness, and even end in depression, or worse, in aggression towards the person or situation that we consider responsible for our frustration.
To overcome this, two very important factors come into play: "perception" and "learning to flow".
It depends on the lens through which we look at our situation or what happens to us, our disposition to experience what we experience as "failures" or to become frustrated for not obtaining what we desire, by this I mean that if we consider the obstacles as an impediment we will surely feel bad; on the other hand, if we see them as a possibility to continue learning and evolving, the feeling of failure will no longer have a place in us.
We can go to an interview expecting to be hired and not get the job, for example, and although our preparation for the job has an important weight, there are other factors that do not depend on us.
A good example at the relationship level would be this: -I spend a whole morning preparing a special dish for my partner expecting him to recognize all the effort and love I put into the dish, and when he arrives he simply eats like any other day without mentioning it-.
What would you choose to do in this case, how would you take it, would it cause suffering for you?
I go to another example a little more extreme, when I wish to keep a partner, a friend, a child by my side, and he or she leaves my side, I will have a suffering if I believe that, because he or she leaves, I am being abandoned or despised. My desire to be loved and my attachment to a certain person make me frame my happiness in keeping him or her. And if I don't succeed, my belief and my attachment crash against reality. And this is the origin of suffering.
The truth is that everything is a deception of our mind, because that other person is not your happiness, it is an illusion that makes you think of that, because happiness is an inherent state of your Being, otherwise it would be to give that power to another, with which we would all be great unhappy.
Do you realize that if we did not feel abandoned, despised or offended, we would not suffer?
You carry love, happiness and peace within you: discover them! And you will no longer need to generate expectations on others.
Other attitudes that will help us to live without attachments and expectations are:
Accepting that we cannot exercise control over everything that happens to us, and consequently assuming life as it presents itself to us, receiving everything that happens to us as learning and opportunities to evolve.
Do not cling to other people with the intention of resolving our emotional conflicts.
Take responsibility for our happiness and our moods.
I hope you liked it, I'll read you in the comments. Blessings ✨
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Hello I am a newbie here... I find your article a very good to read. I have felt a lot of disappointments before because I expect too much from other people. Only to find out I give them more value while I am just nothing to them. So far lesson learned though in the hard way but I learned to just give value to people but not too much. Its best to give more value to oneself.