Did you ever ask yourself why you’ve ever suffered despite having done everything right?  After having an ultra-stressful week thanks to certain bottom-feeding scumbags that I had mistakenly allowed into my business circle, I had an epiphany that I would like to share with you.  Fortunately it only took me three decades to get to this conclusion, but it’s an important one.  If you’ve been experiencing any suffering whatsoever, I urge you to read on so that you can start feeling good again, take control of your feelings, and live an amazing life free from pain.

I’ll start with my own story.  Generally, I’ve always done things right in life.  I was born with intelligence and logic.  In addition to that, I spent years in school, always at the top of my class, never getting into trouble.  I always follow the law, have never been charged with a crime, and have never even received a speeding ticket in my entire life.  Financially, I am very conservative with my money and save well.  On the health side, I exercise regularly, and eat an ultra-clean diet, low in meats yet high in proteins and necessary nutrients – I have a clean bill of health.  I’m close with my parents and have a group of amazing friends.  

Despite all of this, I have found that there has been suffering in my life.  When I say “suffering”, I’m referring to any pain, anguish or stress – basically any negative feelings – that I have felt.  I realized there was a clear disconnect as this equation didn’t make sense.  It didn’t make sense that I experienced suffering when I was doing everything “right”.  I had to get to the bottom of this conundrum.

Don’t get me wrong.  My life is amazing and always has been.  I’m certainly not here to paint a bleak picture – I’ve travelled the world, was raised very well, and have lived a privileged life.  More importantly, I’ve never been one to live a “glass half-empty” kind of life, ever.  When things have gone wrong, I’ve always blamed myself because at the end of the day, even if someone else screws me over, my thought process is that it was my fault for letting them do so in the first place.  But wanting more answers, I decided to figure out what exactly was the problem, so that I could find a solution and live an even better life.  Enough was enough.   

PROBLEM

I found the problem right away:  I was suffering because of other people and for other people.  

Blame-game time.   Rarely, almost never in fact, was I feeling pain because of my own unilateral actions.  As a child, my suffering was caused by bullies at school who belittled me because of my skin color.  At home, I suffered without even realizing it, as I had a family member that experienced depression for years.  Even though the bullying ended around the age of eight, there was still pain thanks to the household situation.  In latter years, a crazy girlfriend with her own issues would cause suffering.  Now, as an attorney, I unfortunately found suffering all around me on a daily basis with overbearing clients trying to impose their poor life decisions on me not by simply hiring me to do legal work, but  by wanting me to emotionally share in their grief.  The final straw most recently was another attorney (not sure how he even has a license given his stupidity) who has spent his life making mistakes and yet blaming everyone else for his own incompetency and failures, desperately trying to draw innocent bystanders into his internal chaos.  I call him “Mr. It’s Not My Fault”.

For someone like me who is hyper-sensitive to people’s energies, these things are so emotionally draining and painful, that I found myself experiencing some form of suffering on a regular basis.  Because it happened so gradually, I never took an opportunity to realize what was going on.  As we adapt, feeling these negative emotions just became part of the job, or part of life, and I accepted it.