Enlightment is Balanced Masochism

Life is full of challenges, it never really gets easy. When i used to be younger i had the impression that eventually after all the hard work i am putting in various skills things are going to reach some sort of equilibrium and things are going to become a lot easy.

Well i am starting to realize that it will never get easy no matter who you are or what do you accomplish you still have problems. Life can be good but never easy, there will always be something wrong with your body, there will be always someone who doesn't like you, In all recorded human history there was peace for about 3% of the time.

So then happiness can't be about everything goes wright, because if everything has to go wright in order for you to be happy. Then being happy is impossible, I think happiness is about resilience is about being flexible. You have to move with the forces that act on you otherwise they will damage you more then if you move with them. Think of a tree bending in the wind if the tree wouldn't be flexible enough to bend when the wind blows it will just snap and die with the first strong wind.

Being big or strong has to be proportional with flexibility either wise things won't last very long, the strongest you are the more flexible you need to be. The bigger the tree the more surface for the wind to push, so that flexibility needs to be maintained.

When it comes to human being we want to be happy, but then something that we call "negative" happens and that happiness is being interrupted by pain. We already have the necessary tools to do this, we have an endocrine system that rewards us for both for the things that we do that are nurturing but also for the pain that we experience.

One of the practices that focuses on this is asceticism, which is part of the eastern religions like Buddhism or Hindu. People that decide to become ascetics renounce all the material things and connections often live just with the bare minimum to survive, and participate in hard practices like long fast or meditation sessions, as well as practices that directly punish the body.

This often leads to the practitioner looking anemic and emaciated like in the picture above. This of course is an extreme form of practice, there is a lot of mysticism behind it which is hard to prove. What i can tell you for sure is that by constantly exposing yourself to a great amount of pain you will have a lot of endorphin's inside your body.

I know becoming an ascetic is not very attractive, fortunately you don't have to i think that life provides you with enough opportunity for practice for learning how to convert your pain in to pleasure. Beside being an anorexic in a monastery is a little to extreme for me and you don't want to miss on life.

All what it take is the commitment to stop assuming that life will get easy, and expose yourself to pain in a controlled way!

The way you increase the flexibility of matter is by exposing it to a controlled force, for example by heating rubber it becomes vulcanized which makes it hundreds of time more elastic.