As a child, she had been abused by a violent father. I saw quickly that her pain was not caused by her present life circumstances but by past heavy pain-body. Her body has become the filter through which she viewed her life situation. She was not yet able to see the link between the emotional pain and her thoughts, being completely identified with both. She could not yet see that she was feeding the pain-body with her thoughts. In other words, she lived with burden of a deeply unhappy self.
I directed the focus of her attention to what she was feeling inside her body and asked her to sense the emotion directly, instead of through the filter of her unhappy thoughts, her unhappy story. She said she expected me to show her the way out of her unhappiness. Reluctantly, she did what I asked her to do. Tears were rolling down her face, her whole body was shaking.
"At this moment, this is what you feel", I said. There is nothing you can do about the fact that at this moment, this is what you feel. Now, instead of wanting this moment to be different from the way it is, which adds more to the pain that is already there, is it possible for you to completely accept that this is what you feel right now?"
She was quiet for a moment. Suddenly, she looked impatient and said angrily, "No, I don't want to accept this!"
"Who is speaking?" I asked her. You or the unhappines in you? Can you see that your unhappiness about being unhappy is just another layer of unhappiness?"
She became quiet again.
"I am not asking you to do anything. All I'm asking is that you find out whether it is possible for you to allow those feelings to be there. In other words, and this may sound strange, if you don't mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness? Don't you want to find out?"
She looked puzzled and while sitting silently, I noticed a significant shift in her energy and said, "This is weird. I'm still unhappy but there's a space around it. It seems to matter less".
That space comes when there is inner acceptance of whatever you are experiencing in this present moment.
-E.Tolle
