A Practice, Not a Pill
It’s very easy to grow restless. In times of pain, this happens quickly, and for seemingly obvious reasons. When your career isn’t working out, or fulfilled relationships seem a distant and shrinking prospect, or a destructive habit looms over you, large and indestructible, then we have nice clear reasons for feeling ill at ease. Of course, it isn’t really that simple. As the professor in my first ever psychology class went to such lengths to stress, “The problem is never the problem.” Our misery does not, in fact, flow from a single external source, except perhaps in the most extreme, life-threatening circumstances. I know people who were miserable despite having every external marker of success. I have known people who were far happier than I despite terminal disease or abject poverty.
Harder to explain—and therefore perhaps, a shorter route to the truth—are those times when we grow uneasy in spite of predominantly positive circumstances. It sort of shakes the whole lie that our happiness can be arranged through various metrics of success, doesn’t it? As I’ve seen so many times, the achievements and possessions we think will make us happy never do, and the lifestyle of prioritizing them is a recipe for misery.
Take my son, Harry, for example, who after months of monumental spiritual growth, has for the past few days been experiencing a subtle but nagging sense of ennui. Not that anything specific has gone terribly wrong, but that something deeply powerful has seemed not to stir as much. You may have felt, on occasions after a great emotional or spiritual high, a sense of winding down, perhaps accompanied by a helpless fear of losing what you had gained.
In Harry’s case, he says, the culprit turned out to be quite simple: his focus slipped.
Over the years, I don’t know how many times I’ve worked with people who had great, positive results from the Codes. Couldn’t say enough good things about the experience. Then we would say our goodbyes and go on our separate ways, and years later I would hear from them again. Sometimes it was about an old problem that had resurfaced, other times, it was something new. But when I asked my natural follow-up, “have you been doing the Codes?” They would answer, “Well… no.”
Even when they have experienced first-hand how well the Codes work, most people stop using them once they’re no longer in pain. We could explore several interesting psychological reasons why this happens. For one, people tend to forget just how painful an experience was once it’s in the past. But if we were to try and pinpoint it more completely, I think that we tend to think of our lives in terms of finishing and possessing things, rather than in terms of practicing and being. In the case of health problems, for example, we want to think about how to address and resolve the problem, rather than about changing our lives to be healthier as a whole. Western medicine reinforces and appeals to this by using drugs and surgeries as direct, concrete answers to specific problems. We like this approach because we want to be able to cross “cancer” or “heart disease” or “acid reflux” off our lists and go back to our lives.
But it is increasingly apparent that virtually all health conditions are ultimately symptomatic of a deeper imbalance. So many clients of mine fail to maintain the habits I teach them, and eventually end up coming back to me, because of this strong tendency to treat healthy balance as a means to an end—the end being a return to their preferred lifestyle which caused the imbalance in the first place.
With some people, this might be something obviously unhealthy, like indulgence of an addiction, but for a lot of people, I think it is a subtler vice of simply not prioritizing what is best, most excellent, and most worthy of praise. Just a kind of casual, everyday selfishness. More and more, I think there must be something fundamentally radical about living a good, healthy life, even on the most basic level. It demands a consistent challenge of focus, a determination toward what really matters, which ironically becomes more difficult without the pressure that naturally comes with pain. I think this is why everyone’s least favorite part of the book of James tells us to treat pain as joy. As I’ve often said, pain demands a response. Without a strong sense of meaning, that response often becomes desperation and despair. But with the necessary senses of meaning and faith, it becomes the world’s most powerful clarifying agent.
I think what I’m trying to say here is that important lessons should be taken to heart. When painful lessons teach you how to improve yourself and shape your life more and more towards health, love, and goodness, it makes no sense to stop once the pain is alleviated. Unless the lessons of pain are remembered, they will probably have to be repeated.
As for Harry, he spotted all this on his own. I have no doubt he’ll be fine—and probably better and better from there. And there’s no reason the same can’t go for you.
Have a blessed, wonderful day!
Dr. Alex Loyd
