😶🌫️What is unpleasant? Working with pain, challenging emotions & thoughts🫣**😶🌫️ Working with Pain, challenging emotions & thoughts 🫣**
*"Karma, or destiny, is an expression of a beneficial law: the universal trend towards balance, harmony and unity. At every moment, whatever happens now, is for the best. It may appear painful and ugly, a suffering bitter and meaningless, yet considering the past and the future it is for the best, as the only way out of a disastrous situation*." (Nisargadatta Maharaj)
**"Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional" is a popular phrase. Most people on the spiritual path face at least at some point pain, challenging emotions and other potential obstacles. On the flip side, there are fascinating practices that focus on working with pain, other 'unpleasant' appearances as well as thoughts and regard them as highly valuable objects to develop insight and other qualities.**
**Let’s share for an afternoon about Pain, thoughts, challenging emotions and potential obstacles, what they means for us and what their role may be on the spiritual journey.**
*“If we give in to our habits of avoiding discomfort, we transform conscious pain (mostly emotional and psychological) into unconscious cramps. [...] We instinctively contract away from acute pain, but that ironically ensures chronic suffering. [...] Suffering is an inappropriate relationship to pain. And by reversing that relationship, we can relieve our suffering.”* (Andrew Holecek)
💫 **What this event offers for you:**
- Guided Meditations for arriving, calming the mind and tuning into your intuition
- Meeting people interested in spirituality (all levels)
- Safe Space for sharing - non-hierarchical and non-judgemental
- Opportunity to ask just about any question
**👀 You may watch one or few of the following Videos for inspiration:**
- Mingyur Rinpoche on Meditation with pain ([Youtube](https://youtu.be/f7NEiKkdwq8?is=jcVU-h5Mp1TpA_H7))
- Shinzen Young on Meditation with Pain ([Youtube](https://youtu.be/5IU6UbRbJvQ?is=OBEhyU-QVGon1uWl))
- Testimonial of a Student of Shinzen Young on an experience of meditating with pain ([Youtube](https://youtu.be/MBI3CRqiSAo?is=tvfB9NUtU8xh9jmu))
- Andrew Holoczek on Reverse Meditation on the Sounds True Podcast ([Youtube](https://youtu.be/_WPP5GL-3-0?is=O4xOxLUnnrf4EDuE))
**About the Organizer**
Martin is a certified Mindfulness Teacher, Systemic Coach, Yogi and Altruist by heart who teaches Meditation and Martial Arts in different formats. However, in this meetup Martin focuses on the altruistic intention to open a space for people to share while offering as much facilitation as needed in the moment.
"*A personal problem cannot be solved on its own level. The very desire to live is the messenger of death, as the longing to be happy is the outline of sorrow. The world is an ocean of pain and fear, of anxiety and despair. Pleasures are like the fishes, few and swift, rarely come, quickly* *gone. A man of low intelligence believes, against all evidence, that he is an exception and that the world owes him happiness. But the world cannot give what it does not have; unreal to the core, it is of no use for real happiness. It cannot be otherwise. We seek the real because we are unhappy with the unreal. Happiness is our real nature and we shall never rest until we find it. But rarely we know where to seek it. Once you have understood that the world is but a mistaken view of reality, and is not what it appears* *to be, you are free of its obsessions. Only what is compatible with your real being can make you happy and the world, as you perceive it, is its outright denial. Keep very quiet and watch what comes to the surface of the mind. Reject the known, welcome the so far unknown and reject it in its turn."* (Nisargadatta Maharaj)