The Utility of Tough Times

In this the second edition of Phoenix Rising, I explore the utility of tough times, and how it is that challenges, obstacles and even old traumas, become the base metal bars of the alchemist’s wand.

As you will discover, the answer lies not in the ‘tough times’ themselves, but in the ‘going through’ them. Their utility is in the lessons they have to teach, the resources they have to offer, and insights that they reveal.

And all of this abundance is available to all of us right now when we come to know that the end of suffering, and the rewarding and fulfilling life we seek, is through suffering.

Unfortunately a lot of us put a lot of energy into resisting the tough times by either trying to delete them from our past, navigate away from them in our future, or by do everything we can to avoid them in our present.

Perhaps after experiencing what I have to share here you will come to know (and believe), that the challenges and obstacles we face in the living of our lives are in truth the fuel that feeds our future growth.

Never wish a minute of the me away.

Here's where we're going:

Use Memories For How You Need Them Now

Memories are not about our past, they are about our hopes for the future!

We too often look back at challenging memories and cringe, or even weep. In their recalling we allow ourselves to be once more mired in their old shame or pain.

?We forget that they are memories, and that the you there then, is not the you here now.

In this thought experiment we discover that even the most challenging events of the past, are a rich source wisdom, insight and resourcefulness with which to create the kind of fulfilling and rewarding life we would love to be living today.

The Utility of Tough Times

So what is it about tough times that make them doorways through which we can all walk, into more rewarding and fulfilling lives well and truly lived?

It seems a bit bleak for that doesn’t it?!

And why did the Buddha choose 'suffering' as the central insight of the teachings that earnestly flowed from his own awakening?

Well… spoiler alert… he didn’t.

He used the word Dukkha which most often, and most unsatisfactorily, gets translated as ‘suffering’.?

Now this isn't an arcane piece of interpartive nit picking, it is important. Because that blunt translation has so many of us putting bolts and bars on the very door through which the life we would love to live is reached.

However, if we can let go of those inhibiting preconceptions, and use instead the words 'tough times', that door swings open. And we get to see all the way through to a place from which that life we would love to live, can be experienced as the life we live today.

But when we close our eyes to the emancipating utility of tough times, the most incisive and astute insight into the true nature of our human experience, and how to transform that experience into the profound peace of a human being, being truly conscious, is lost.

And that is so sad.

Because in this turning away we disinherit ourselves from an experience of life and living, that in the glimpses I have had, is revealed to be achingly exquisite.

So let me say it load and clear, Dukkha is not suffering in the one-dimensional way we tend to make it mean, and to conceive of it thus is to take a single leaf to be the entire tree.

Dukkha is a clear and compassionate, lovingly tender insight into the ripples of those tough times that furrow the surface of what would otherwise be, the still calm lake of a fulfilling life well lived.

Some ripples and waves you could and should of course call suffering in all its pained conceptual form, others though may simply be the uneasy disquiet that whispers in the stillness of ‘time to think’.

And it is also true that some of those ripples are the lovely things in life.

The fleeting pleasures we wish would stay, the sweet taste of fruit that drifts away, and the final notes of a beautiful song that we wish would linger and never be gone.

It is in these all-encompassing everythings, that the real meaning and revelatory depth of Dukkha is revealed.

Not because these things themselves contain the poison of suffering, but because the living of life with its multi-various vicissitudes, stimulates a desire for these things to either be gone, or to linger on… and there in that craving is the cause of it all.

The rippling unreliability of wanting things to be other than they are.

So Dukkha points in antonym toward it sister Sukha, the peace and joy, happiness and love lying just beneath the unsettled surface of all our tough times.

But these are all just words, and 'the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon'.

A single word alone lacks the nuance and subtlety required to hold this Orchid of enlightenment safe, as we ask it to prove its own beauty.

Surrender words, surrender suffering, and allow the utility of tough times to be your teacher.

Let lake waters still to glass the thin-skinned surface of this craven craving world.?

And there in depth for all to see, the tough times reveal their utility.

Witness This Metamorphosis

When we have the courage to go into and through the tough times, intimately in amongst the meaning making stories that made them up, we cross the event horizon.

Awareness falls away from far ahead, and rests instead on the lake shore line of the anything is possible place.

And from there, all the clouds that had for so long darkened our skies, become what they have always really been... merely vapour.

And in this lighting up we see, all of the resources we could ever need, come rainbowing down from within those most challenging of times.

It is a vast place of peace.

In this story for your subconscious mind, I will take you there.

The Phoenix Rising Process

The Phoenix Rising process is a private one on one coaching program for high achievers who are at a point in their lives where a profound shift is becoming, or has become, essential.

If you feel that the Phoenix Rising process may be able to help you, please feel free to DM me for more information on how it works, or simply set up a conversation by using the link below. It will be a pleasure to help you in any way I can.