Living Skillfully with the Difficult

As much as we would all prefer that it wasn’t so, difficult times are an unavoidable part of the ever-changing stream of life. Difficulties come on their own accord irrespective of whether they are deserved or fair and regardless of our ability to bear them. The difficult can manifest in any aspect of life, including physical, mental, or emotional health; career or job; financial situation; and relationships with friends, family, and intimate partners. Sometimes the difficulties we encounter are minor and tedious but numerous. For example, you might have a difficult relationship with a sibling who constantly criticizes you; although no single instance of their judgment constitutes a significant hardship, you have an abiding sense of being treated unfairly. Sometimes difficulties are major and dramatic, such as the unexpected death of a loved one or losing your job. And sometimes you’re faced with a difficulty that is constant and cannot be changed, such as a physical disability or chronic illness. It’s essential that you learn to live skillfully with the difficult; otherwise you may collapse into destructive, negligent, or self-defeating behavior, which will only compound your suffering.

I use the phrase “learn to live skillfully with the difficult” because it points to the fundamental truth that each of us has the capacity to accept, accommodate, and adjust to what cannot be changed. The process of learning to live skillfully with the difficult is gradual and not easily or happily accomplished, but once learning has occurred you will discover that even in the midst of extreme difficulty, when the quality of your outer life may be greatly diminished, you still have an inner experience of well-being.

Relaxing Your Attention and Softening into Your Experience

The untrained mind naturally reacts unskillfully to difficulties because it does not realize that there is an alternative response, which is to soften into the experience. By this I mean that you can learn to relax your attention and cease to resist the unpleasant feelings that arise in response to difficult situations.

Attention is the capacity of your mind to focus where you direct it, and the quality of your attention can vary dramatically depending on your life circumstances. During difficult times, when it is disturbed by tension, your attention may have a jumpy, rigid, fixed, or fuzzy quality. As a result you may be unable to effectively respond to difficult circumstances. Therefore it’s crucial to cultivate relaxed attention.

In relaxed attention your focus is neutral. There’s no tension in your attention, so you feel more at ease in the face of difficulty. You cultivate relaxed attention by practicing noticing the tension underlying your attention whenever you experience something difficult and remembering your intention to relax your attention. Most of the time the tension will release immediately. If you are deeply enmeshed in a difficulty, it may take some time for this release to happen, but with continued practice you will develop the ability to focus on any degree of difficulty without added tension.

Relaxed attention sets the stage for softening into your experience. I like to use the phrase softening into your experience because it captures the felt sense of relief that occurs when you become mindful of your resistance to the difficult and then release it. Softening into your experience isn’t about collapsing or quitting on yourself but rather about fully accepting that difficulty is a natural part of life. When you stop objecting to the difficult, two benefits arise: you suffer less, and you have more energy at your disposal to skillfully deal with the difficult when it arises.

One Man’s Journey to Softening into the Difficult

Jim is a Life Balance client who separated from his wife three years ago, after being married for several decades. The primary reason for the separation was that his wife is an alcoholic. After trying everything he could imagine to help her overcome her addiction, Jim finally decided to leave the marriage for the sake of his own survival. It was a very hard decision for him, and he continues to support his ex-wife in numerous ways.

Since the separation, Jim has been consumed by feelings of helplessness and survivor’s guilt and has wrestled with the question of whether he was an enabler in his ex-wife’s addiction. For more than a year after leaving the marriage, he lived in a barren apartment while his ex-wife lived in their beautifully decorated home, because he did not feel he had the right to create his own place as long as she was still struggling with her problems. As we’ve worked together, Jim has come to realize just how traumatizing it has been for him to watch the slow, steady deterioration of this woman he deeply cares for.

I had Jim explore softening into his experience and accepting that he could not control the situation. He now sees how tense his mind becomes each time he focuses on his ex-wife and has learned to relax his attention whenever he speaks to her or does something for her. Moreover, he sees how rigid his mind had become and how that rigidity was preventing him from moving on and creating a life for himself. In the process he also realized that he was angry and he behaved defensively toward her, which caused huge amounts of tension, and that his fear for her combined with his sense of helplessness had hardened him in a way that was causing him to disassociate from life.

The change in Jim has been remarkable. It hasn’t happened quickly or easily, but he has definitely developed a more easeful, openhearted relationship to his ex-wife’s difficulty. He remains very sad about her situation, but he is no longer caught in a reactive mind state in his relationship to it.

You Are Not Your Difficulty

Like Jim, you too may be forced to live with a difficult situation and may be unconsciously identifying with the limitations it creates and living out your role as a person with that difficulty. For instance, maybe you have a physical or mental condition that is chronic, such as Lyme disease or ADHD, or maybe you’re a cancer survivor. It’s easy to define yourself in terms of these conditions because it takes so much of your time and energy to deal with the difficulty, to begin to believe that “I’m a person with Lyme disease,” or “I’m a person with ADHD,” or ”I’m a person with cancer.”

If you find yourself anticipating how your difficulty will limit you in a situation or using it as an excuse to not show up, or if at every opportunity you tell friends or new acquaintances about your difficulty, then you have identified yourself with it. You are literally addicted to your difficulty. You are separating from life and denying yourself the possibility of unknown and unexpected joy by placing such distinct limits on who you can be.

You are not your difficulty; it is only one of the many things that characterize you. All your other characteristics—your generosity, friendliness, kindness, curiosity, willingness to learn, humor, loyalty, etc.—define you more accurately than whatever difficulty you may have in your life, no matter how great that difficulty is.

Skillful Means for Moving Beyond the Difficult

Once you’ve learned how to soften into your experience, you can begin to shift the way difficulties affect your body and your emotions and start to reframe the way you describe your situation to yourself and others. I once again recommend starting with awareness of the body; every strong emotion manifests in the body, so you can often recognize it as a physical sensation first. Moreover, when dealing with difficulties, you may harm your body in various ways: from the tension in your attention or the stress of your uncertainty, or from losing sleep or abusing food, alcohol, or drugs, etc. Softening into your experience allows you to realize the damage you are causing to your body and to take responsibility for nourishing it as best you’re able during difficult times.

Likewise, softening into your experience allows you to become mindful of your emotions and to see how they are triggered by difficulties in your life. Notice how you relate to each of these emotions. Do you feed the emotion? Are you ashamed of it or do you deny its existence? Are you so identified with your difficult emotion that it is distorting the truth of your situation? Are you so overwhelmed by emotion that you are locked in an endless cycle of despair? Observe these emotions with great compassion and sympathy, for it’s hard to cope with what’s difficult in your life. It’s very important that you be truthful with yourself about the emotions that arise in you in reaction to difficulties and not to judge yourself for having them. As with the body, do what you can to comfort the emotions, give yourself mental breaks, and find support from others.

Whatever emotions you are having, repeatedly remind yourself that they are just emotions, which arise and pass, and that they are simply the result of impersonal causes and conditions outside you. As you cease to be identified with these emotions, your mind will come back into balance.

Once you’ve regained a level of balance in body and emotion, you can start to reframe the way you describe your difficult situation to yourself and others. You may discover that your language is embedded with self-criticism, hopelessness, or self-pity, which not only makes you feel worse but also alienates and isolates you from others. Likewise, the narrative and prognosis you’ve internalized, the story you’ve identified with, may ignore what is good in your life.

Set an intention to practice being open to living with the difficult. You might say to yourself, “I’m going to make a practice out of living with difficulty. It is my value to meet difficulty and to interact with it as deeply as I can.” By simply doing this, you already start to shift your orientation—the difficulty is no longer something that’s separate from your life because you’re no longer objecting to life being difficult sometimes. You’re avowing your willingness to interact with and respond to what’s difficult and to find meaning in it, even if the difficulty is something that’s going to come again and again.

A few words of caution: If you’re living with a difficult situation and find yourself in this moment at peace with it, don’t go looking for the “ouch.” It’s unskillful to think, “I’m in a difficult situation, and therefore I’m supposed to feel how difficult my life is right now.” When you do start feeling weighed down by the difficulty, repeat loving-kindness and compassion phrases, such as, “May I have a calm, clear mind in this difficult moment.”

Another skillful means of building your capacity for living with the difficult is seeking support. That support may come from friends or family or a pet or being in nature. It might also be professional sup- port, from a psychotherapist, perhaps, or a spiritual community. Sometimes you simply need to feel the presence of another person, or to know that someone cares about you, or to sense the beauty of the world. At other times you may need professional guidance to make your way through a difficulty. It isn’t weak to seek help; it’s an act of courage. You aren’t being a burden to others by asking for help, as long as you respect their time and needs; instead you’re giving them an opportunity to make a difference in the life of another.

Protecting Your Heart from the Difficult

One of the great challenges in life is to not allow the presence of the difficult in your life to shut down your heart. The Buddha taught that awareness of certain universal truths can prepare your heart for living with the difficult. The first of these truths is that everyone experiences difficulty, not just you or the people you care about. The second is that life is always changing, and there’s no way you can ever get it to be just right. The conditions of your life—your financial situation, health, relationships, etc.—will change, and so will everyone else’s; therefore you are having a shared experience in this perilous journey we call life.

Ultimately you are faced with this question: are you willing to accept life on its own terms? I have a friend who was riding his bicycle one evening when he lost consciousness because of an undiagnosed medical condition. When he awoke, he was lying on the ground and quadriplegic. He was in the prime of his life, an athlete, and he had done nothing careless, but he was suddenly faced with a dramatically life-altering difficulty.

It would have been so easy for my friend to quit, to become bitter about life, and to feel sorry for himself. Instead he accepted life on its terms. As he lay in the hospital, not knowing whether he would ever recover from his spinal injuries, he simply started trying to move some part of his body. Day after day he practiced moving some- thing until finally one day he was able to flex the thumb on his right hand. It was several more days before he could move his other thumb and many more days before he could move the rest of his fingers and many weeks before he could move his arms. Months passed and he regained his ability to move his whole body, although in a limited manner.

My friend’s recovery is an inspiring story; however, his life and the lives of his family are now dramatically different than before the accident. His life is simply like this. Living with the difficult is just one factor in his life among many, including his knowledge, his strong work ethic, and his love for his wife and daughter. Just as my friend continues to embrace his life with these new, difficult conditions, you too are challenged to find the beauty, joy, and meaning in the life you have.