A New Relationship with Reality

A New Relationship with Reality

My aim when working with people is to help them develop a new relationship with reality. These are usually individuals with an addiction issues who have already worked out that their problem is their perception of life rather than life itself. After all, ingesting a drug doesn’t actually change our world, it just changes how we view our world. So, on some level, we’ve already decided the problem is our relationship with life.

My own enthusiasm for alcohol began in my early-teens because drinking helped me feel comfortable in my own skin. Drinking didn’t change my world, but it certainly changed how I felt about things.

Drugs do change our perception of reality in a way that some of us find highly desirable.  Over time though, these substances create an increased sense of disconnection, dissatisfaction, and mistrust of life. We end up in a worse position than before we found our ‘chemical answer’.

Changing Our Perception is the Answer

Our method may have been a failure, but our insight that the problem was our perception of life, rather than life itself, was a good one. The good news is we can change our way of perceiving so that we no longer mistrust life, no longer feel disconnected, and feel so satisfied with our life that drugs (or any other form of avoiding reality) no longer have the slightest appeal to us.

This is a way of perceiving reality that doesn’t involve ingesting dangerous chemicals, costs nothing, has no negative side-effects, and lasts forever.

The Three Aspects of a New Relationship with Reality

There are three aspects to this new relationship with reality:

• Wonder
• Intimacy
• Trust

We can begin to get a taste for each of these through meditation and other practices. It is my goal when working with clients to direct them towards these qualities. I do so because it was allowing these three qualities to reveal themselves that brought an end to my own seeking for something better – and all the trouble that entailed.

So, let’s take a brief at each of these – I will go into much more detail in future posts.

Wonder

Much of our dissatisfaction with life occurs because we think we know that is going on. Our head is full of stories about how things ‘should be’ rather than noticing how things actually are. Instead of being fascinated by the mysterious and ever-changing world around us, we prefer to focus on what we know. This leads to a life that feels stale, limited, and where taking drugs to feel better makes perfect sense.

Wonder means meeting life from a place of curiosity. It involves letting go of our ideas about how things are, and actually looking to see what’s there. When we do this, something amazing happens. Everything we took for granted suddenly appears new, mysterious, and full of possibilities. Most of us are flabbergasted by how we could have missed such a wonder that was always right in front of us.

Intimacy

Our sense of disconnection from the world is arises due to the fact that we have become mesmerized by thinking. It is like becoming so engrossed while reading a horror story that we began to believe it is real. This relationship with thinking creates an imaginary barrier between us and everything else. As we pay more attention to our life, we begin to see how ridiculous this belief was – there is no part of us that doesn’t belong to life, so how could we be separate from it?

Once the sense of disconnection disappears, we discover a sense of intimacy with life that our heart yearns for. This sense of connection does not depend in any way on life behaving a certain way or other people behaving a certain way. We discover that intimacy is not something that we have to earn, but is what exists when we lower our thought-generated barriers.

Trust

Trust is the recognition that right now is the only way it ever could be. It is what it is – always. It is the ridiculous belief that we are somehow getting ‘now’ wrong that triggers anxiety, self-loathing and an inability to relax. Practices like Vipassana can help us to see that we have no choice as to what is arising – all that matters for our peace of mind is how we are relating to what happens. The Christian mystic Anthony de Mello summed up trust best with the words ‘absolute cooperation with the inevitable’.