Month: December 2015

Is Suffering Optional?

Recently I had a disagreement with a friend in recovery about the concept of suffering. In his spiritual background, which is Buddhist, he feels that while pain is mandatory, that suffering is completely optional. With the spiritual background I grew up with, which is Christian, both pain and suffering are a part of one’s journey to grow closer to God. While I can’t honestly say whether one is more true than the other, what I do know is that I’ve actually practiced both philosophies and each have worked for me at various times in my life.

There actually was a time that I fully believed that suffering was totally optional. During that period, I can safely say I didn’t have too many difficult things going on in my life. I was earning a good living, my health was pretty much intact, and I was quite physically active with sports to keep myself in shape. For what things that did arise during that time that could have brought me suffering, I was able to channel them into many different facets and in doing so, kept it mostly at bay.

But over the past five years, I’ve gone through such incredible pain that all those facets I once might have delved into to prevent me from suffering have become next to impossible to do. Now I bear the brunt of so much pain on a daily basis without many outlets to tune it out that I am finding I’m suffering a lot more. That’s in stark contrast to when all this began when I still had much of that Buddhist philosophy working and felt that suffering was indeed optional.

Lately, I have been suffering quite quite a bit, none of which I believe is being caused by my own actions like much of it used to be in the past. And I continue to do my absolute best to put one foot in front of the other each day to keep going. But is the suffering I’m going through now still optional? Is there truly some switch that I can just turn off and deal with all my pain but not suffer from it? I don’t know.

What I do know is that I am suffering…a lot actually, but I continue to turn my will and my life over to God and seek comfort from Christ to get through it every single day. So I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe spiritual philosophies work for people depending on what they’re going through at any point in time.

For my friend who has his own set of life circumstances going on, his Buddhist philosophy of feeling that suffering is optional is working for him. As for me, seeking Christ and God and continuing to go through the pain and suffering I am going through is doing one good thing for me. It’s helping me to draw closer to my Higher Power, which is something I was so far away from before all this suffering began years ago. Nonetheless, I’m sure more will be revealed on my spiritual journey with whether suffering truly is optional or not, the longer I remain on firm spiritual ground… 🙂

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

The Adult Coloring Book Craze

A few months ago I was doing a lead at a local AA meeting when an interesting girl walked up to me after I was finished and told me she had been able to pay attention for the entire time I spoke. She then showed me a book, said it was an adult coloring one, and explained it was normally what kept her attention deficit disorder at bay during most meetings. While I was grateful for her compliment and gave that credit to my Higher Power, I was actually more interested in talking about the book she had just showed me, which was titled “Color Me Calm, 100 Coloring Templates for Meditation and Relaxation.”

She explained that somehow coloring helped her to focus, as well as keep her relatively still for long periods of time. At first, I couldn’t imagine how something as simple as coloring could do that, but then I thought about the complex puzzles I do from time to time and how that achieves the very same thing for me. I asked to look through her book, saw how it wasn’t just basic pictures, and it began to make sense. There were intricate mandalas, waterscapes, wooded scenes, geometric patterns, and much more spread throughout the book, each having very precise areas to color. As I drove home from the meeting after that, I remembered my childhood coloring days when I would take crayons and try to stay within the borders of whatever picture I was working on, even ones that should have been extremely simple, except they never were for me. Usually I just got frustrated and smeared the entire page with a big mess of colored scribbles. After recollecting those not so pleasant memories of my earliest attempts at being an artist, I put the entire adult coloring book thing behind me, that was until I got on the phone with my sister a day or so later.

When I asked what she was up to during my call to her, she said she was working on a picture in her adult coloring book and all I could say was, “Really?” She wasn’t kidding and told me it was truly helping her in the same ways it had helped that girl from the meeting I did my lead at. It was then I knew I didn’t need a third reminder to come my way, as that regularly seems to be what happens when my Higher Power wants me to pursue something that would help me on my spiritual journey. Within a day or so after that phone call, I ordered that Color Me Calm book, two sets of artists colored stencils, and a manual sharpener. And wouldn’t you know, once I received it and began doing some of my own coloring again after decades of not doing so, I actually found great joy and peace in it.

While I can’t really say I understand why coloring helps me these days rather than aggravate me like it always used to, I’m just grateful I’ve found yet another way to slow down, meditate, and relax in a world that often seems so darn filled with too much hustle and bustle. And now it seems as if everyone else is finding this out as well, because everyone I end up talking to about this says they too are getting into the adult coloring book craze.

So if you happen to be someone who’s trying to find a way to create a little more peace in your life, I suggest trying this route, as you may soon discover just like I and so many others already have, how it can come from something as simple as coloring…

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Just one of own colorings… 🙂

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Daily Reflection

“Patience is the calm acceptance that things can happen in a different order than the one you have in mind.” (David G. Allen)

Having patience with things is probably the biggest test most of us face quite consistently throughout life. It’s something that seems to be tested on many of our days, usually in a wide variety of ways. It happens when we’re on the road sitting in traffic, it happens when we are in a line at a store, it happens when we put our name on a list at a restaurant, it happens we’re looking for a job, it happens when we see others not acting in ways we think they should be, and so on and so forth. And all too often it also seems that having patience in these situations doesn’t always translate into it working out in the way we want. Over the past few years, my own patience has been tested in dealing with my health, as it feels like it’s been an exceptionally long time that I’ve had to endure a lot of physical, mental, and emotional pain. But even more prevalent has been the harsh reality that the more I’ve worked on becoming healthier and done my best to remain patient with the process, the more it feels like my health has grown even worse. And the truth is I always thought I would slowly start feeling better the more I worked on myself. But could it truly be that the darkest of all this was left for the very end, meaning the worst has come just before the dawn of me having that far healthier-feeling life? I’m choosing to believe this is so and while this may not be the way I envisioned I’d get better over time, looking at it in this light has definitely helped to much more calmly accept today’s quote. That maybe having patience really does mean that sometimes things happen in a different order than the one we had in mind…

I pray I accept that having patience doesn’t always mean things will work out in the order I had in mind, but that eventually it will indeed work out for my greatest, highest good.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson