You Do Know Suffering is Optional, Don’t You?
Do you get that you don’t need to suffer
“Yuk.” Thomas spat it out into a tissue.
“That’s disgusting.”
I love young clients.
When my daughters were young, they loved sharing a packet of jelly beans with their friends.
These weren’t the regular jelly beans but the kind that would trick you. If you picked an orange bean, it might taste of Tutti Frutti or stinky socks or a brown one might taste of chocolate or poo.
I sometimes still buy these beans for young clients, like Thomas, not to feed them sugary snacks or laugh when they get a booger instead of a juicy pear, but to help them understand the role of thought.
When they take a sweet, I can tell how it tastes from their face. If it’s a good one, they want to keep chewing, but if it’s disgusting, their face screws up, and I give them a tissue to spit it out.
And then, I tell them what I want them to do with their thoughts. If they’re thinking about something nice, enjoy the thought, savour it, and chew it over, but if they have a scary or worrying thought, why would they want to keep that?
Spit it out.