XI. Believing it will be easy blinds us to the real work.
Be wary of someone’s proposed “fix” to your struggle if it seems too easy. This stuff takes time. It takes effort. It can be interesting, as in, it doesn't always have to be an awful slog, but it's not comfortable.
A fix is like a scaffolding - someone else can come and install it for you, and it can help you do a certain thing in your life, like be in less pain in your neck. But unless you get right in there and pay kind attention to learning what is going on underneath, you are going to keep having to ask someone to climb up that scaffolding again and again to manage that same spot.
There is possible frustration in thinking that this is going to be a quick something-or-other and your struggle will be over. It’s likely that it’s not. You might feel a certain degree better straight away, but if you carry on in this healing journey, that “better” feeling will grow and deepen in ways that you cannot even imagine. Likely you will experience profound discomfort too. That’s ok.
It’s also helpful if you can understand that trying to just “let go” of something, or pretending that it doesn’t exist in the first place, is a self-imposed quick fix. When you “let go” of something (however you see that happening) it’s like throwing a boomerang away and hoping it will stay away. It is unlikely that it will.
Digesting an experience, however, is a different thing entirely than attempting to force yourself not to experience the effects of the issue. Here you take in all the understanding and self-knowledge that you can at that moment from the issue. And the thing that was holding you stuck is more likely to just not be an issue anymore. You didn’t do anything to it to make it go away. You concentrated your effort on seeing it clearly in all of its effects on your life, and then it just ceased to be a huge deal. (Much more on in this in the next chapter, “On How We Get Free.”)