Wellbeing vs Enlightenment: Pain to Pleasure vs Suffering to Spiritual Realization (EP16)

What is our life purpose? What is our spiritual life purpose? How can we balance our effort towards well-being with our spiritual surrender? This episode maps two paths: The "horizontal path" has its survival needs, daily responsibilities, self care, and right effort toward well-being and wellness, and this is perhaps our human life purpose: survival as a movement away from pain and toward pleasure, and thriving in well-being. (Though we can get caught in pleasure-seeking and pain avoidance). 

Then we have the "vertical path", and this is our spiritual life purpose. Here we move from suffering to enlightenment. The key of walking this path is knowing and accepting that both pain and pleasure together walk us up this path. Now we are not trying to run from pain towards pleasure but instead to take both pain and pleasure as our teachers and as steps towards something greater than both: full peace when we are neither avoiding nor grasping but trusting and including and being included in all.

**

To visualize this, consider 4 quadrants in an XY axis:

- The x axis is the wellness path that goes from pain on the left to pleasure on the right.

- The y axis is the enlightenment path that goes from suffering below to enlightenment above. 

- Note that as we walk the enlightenment path, we experience both pain to the left of us and pleasure to the right of us, equally, as we walk up the path. (You can also visualize a wave going up the y axis sometimes veering left (pain experiences) and sometimes veering right (pleasure experiences) but always ultimately going upward.

***

SHARE WITH A FRIEND!

Get on the newsletter at:

www.thegroundoflove.com

***

This podcast series is for people dedicated to spiritual awakening, spiritual practice, psychology, healing work, collective healing and awakening, and global positive social change. Which of your friends would like this? Please send them a link :)

***

Click "Follow" to receive future episodes, released weekly. 

For private healing sessions & zoom events: www.thegroundoflove.com

***

1:13 - The Path of Wellbeing

4:44 - The Path of Enlightenment

6:39 - Pain vs Suffering: The Role of Blame

11:12 - Both Paths Together

15:04 - What Do You Really Want?

19:24 - How to Walk the Path of Enlightenment?

22:57 - LIfe's Promise

24:01 - The Spiral up Towards Enlightenment

26:35 - Personal Will vs God's Will

29:49 - Life Purpose, Well-Being Path

34:22 - Life Purpose, Enlightenment Path

37:40 - Final Conclusion: Bringing it All Together

***

Get on the newsletter at: 

www.thegroundoflove.com

***

Keywords:

Wellbeing, enlightenment, realization, true self, life purpose, optimizing wellness, acceptance, spiritual growth, personal healing, advanced spiritual path, embodied spirituality.

Meditation, consciousness, esoteric, esoteric wisdom, nonduality, spiritual awakening, spiritual practice, mindfulness, psychology, trauma healing, emotional healing, somatic healing, personal development, embodiment, ego-death, meditation, new age, bhakti, buddhism, christianity, hinduism, indigenous wisdom, indigeneity, ancient wisdom traditions, esoteric, energy healing work, ancient wisdom, sangha, holistic healing, wholeness, groundedness, grounded spirituality, Divine Will, root causes, trauma healing, inner healing, emotional healing, spiritual ascension, collective healing, collective awakening, global ascension, connection with angels, connect with your guides, collective awakening, collective healing

www.thegroundoflove.com

Transcript

0:00

So what we think we want is wellbeing, but what we really want is liberation. What we think we want is greatest pleasure, basically. What we really want, whether or not we know it, is liberation, is enlightenment. And the good news is that that's where we're going anyway, independent of what we want or think we want so that's a Grace right there. And yet what we're not that into is how it happens, which is through an equal inclusion of what we could call light and shadow or pleasure and pain. Welcome to the Ground of Love. I'm your host, Olivia Frazao. This is a podcast for people who are deeply dedicated to the spiritual journey. You are here for self-growth care, for others, and being of service to the world. This podcast is in service to you to help you remember who you are and why you are here, you will receive inspiration, clarity, and no BS Love. We are walking each other home. Let's begin. So I'm going to provide you with an image that will be our teacher for this episode, and if you want to, you can draw this, and if you're driving or cooking or whatever, it's simple enough to just visualize. At the end. What we're gonna have, just so you know, what we're getting to is we're gonna have a cross, like a XY axis, okay? Right now just imagine a horizontal line that's going towards the right, like an arrow. So on the left side, what are we going to label that side as we're gonna label it pain. Okay. So on the right side, the arrow is pointing towards wellbeing, so we have that polarity and the spectrum in between. Pain to wellbeing. So is that the goal of life, to move from pain to wellbeing? Our body, our physiology, our animal nature, even our psyche, our mental and emotional bodies are all going to say yes. That is the goal of life is my survival, my pleasure, and my wellbeing. Now. From this lens, if that's all we've got, if this horizontal arrow is all we've got, then our goal in life is going to be what a lot of people's goals are. More pleasure, more abundance, more success, whatever that means to you. It could look like more acquisition, more accolades, more fun things like more free time to play and hang out with your family and loved ones or more, I don't know, deeper romantic relationship. Literally anything that you would consider to be pleasureful. Right? And that's only possible. All of those things are only possible with the main greatest things that we want and need, survival at its most basic health and safety. And then we have all of those more fun things that we put on top of it once we have gotten the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs met. So it's this spectrum towards greater and greater wellbeing. Now, Every aspect of ourselves, our physical being, our body, our physiology, our instinctual responses, our animal body and our human psyche, our emotional and mental bodies are all on this arrow. We are fighting for a life that provides us with greater and greater wellbeing. That is what the goal is. Remove that. That is the goal of physical life as we know it, as a physical and psychological being. So Now we're going to add the spiritual component, and you'll see why this entire episode is for people who are really hardcore on this spiritual path. Because this stuff is not easy, and only because I'm talking about it does not mean that it's easy for me either. Just to be very clear, we are now going to put a vertical line. That crosses with the horizontal line. So we basically have an XY axis. So what is the Y axis? Now, imagine that the vertical line is going up, so the arrow is pointing up and what's at the top is enlightenment. And at the bottom you could have ignorance. I'm gonna call that also suffering. So our goal is to go up this arrow of experiences, of life, experiences that undoes our ignorance, that that relieves our suffering, that unveils the blockages to our true perception to who we are and what reality is so that we can be free enlightenment as realization of our true nature and liberation from suffer. So this vertical line takes us from illusion, ignorance, suffering to enlightenment as total freedom. Freedom from what? Freedom from suffering. So the experience here of enlightenment is what you could call if you wish to be the ultimate spiritual wellbeing. And when we look at where we are coming out of on both of those lines, the horizontal one, we're coming out of pain towards wellbeing. If we're on that line and if we're on the vertical line, we're coming out of suffering towards enlightenment. So one of them starts at pain and one of them starts at suffering. So what is the relationship between pain and suffering? How do they relate and how do they compare? Part of suffering, which is part of the main point of this episode that I'm trying to make part of suffering, is thinking that we are not supposed to feel pain and that there is something wrong with us, with life, with God, with other people. Or with our faith, if we are experiencing pain, there is nothing wrong with us and there is nothing wrong with life and there is nothing wrong with God. When life throws us something that we do not understand, that we do not want, that we do not quote unquote deserve, that is painful. You are not wrong or bad for something difficult or painful happening in life. So people ask themselves,"why? Why did I attract this?" Or people could ask themselves,"why is God doing this to me?" Or even maybe people get to a point of thinking,"there must be no God. Because if there were, this wouldn't have happened." So this is where, and I've said this before, we have this feeling of failure or betrayal as a result of the fact that we had been holding this false illusion that we were somehow supposed to be protected from life's difficulties, but they happened. So if we're supposed to be protected from them, but they happened, then there must be a failure here. There must be a betrayal here. Maybe we have subconsciously or consciously, maybe we had been holding these thoughts,"well, those things, yes, they happen, but that can happen across the world to somebody else. Or even to my neighbor, to somebody else, but not to me". If we have that false belief that we are somehow magically protected from everything that life has to offer, pleasureful and painful, regardless of which then if or when difficulties do occur, we are going to have a false belief system that those events are going to filter through When they come into our awareness and we're gonna blame ourselves or somebody else, or God, we are either gonna say that we failed or that somebody else failed, or that God failed or that God doesn't exist. Or maybe we'll say, I must deserve something bad because actually maybe I'm bad. Right? There's a lot of guilt and blame, and"this happened because you're good or this happened because you are bad." That kind of stuff exists in certain religions that we need to be very careful about. We need to be very careful about where we are carrying this kind of stuff, because high likelihood from childhood, almost everyone is carrying those types of thoughts because of how we were disciplined when we were kids. But as I just said, some people are carrying this stuff also from their religions, which is really dangerous because people go to religion for truth. But that's wounding, so people can get very confused. And we can think that there's something wrong with us when life deals us a tough hand. There is nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with us, so we're gonna get to that more. Okay, so let's look at what is the relationship between these two intersecting lines that we now have? The x and Y axis, or these two arrows, right? One pointing horizontally toward wellbeing and the other pointing vertically towards enlightenment. We're talking about the horizontal line being the trajectory of life that we have apparently been walking. But now when we look at it from the relationship with the vertical line, we can see that the horizontal one is actually what we could call a competing trajectory. But now when we look at both of them, we can see that if we don't put them into some kind of a, a hierarchy or a relationship with each other, they look like opposing and competing trajectories potentially. we need to understand that one of them is actually subservient to the other. So Where are we seeing them clearly, or where are we in some kind of a misunderstanding? Let's go through all of this. Okay? Which is the line that you are following through life? The path from pain to wellbeing, or the path from suffering to enlightenment. Now in a way. It's a little bit of a trick question, so stay with me. The horizontal line is the line that we have been taught by our culture to follow, I believe most people are actually unaware of the vertical line. Or maybe there is an awareness, but not enough understanding or guidance or whatever it is that we need to have greater faith and apply ourselves more and give ourselves more to the vertical line. The problem with the horizontal line is that we can put in a lot of good and important effort to increase our wellbeing, and we deserve that from ourselves. We deserve to take care of ourselves well and take care of each other well. We deserve to give ourselves the best shot at feeling good when it comes to self-care and being responsible and caring towards ourselves and other people and there is no life protection that says, oh yes, if you check all of the check boxes, you will get where you want to go. Because ultimately life has somewhere greater than it wants to take you to. And it has nothing to do with wellbeing. With wellbeing on the human level, let's say. And that is the difficult pill to swallow that I'm offering in this episode. If you are on a conscious road to enlightenment, you are aware of the blessings even with the difficulties of life itself as your greatest teacher on your spiritual path. And I say conscious road to enlightenment because I personally believe that we are all on a road to enlightenment. So this vertical line, I'm gonna say it's not a line that some of us are on and other people are not on. We are all on this line because what if the vertical line is the actual real trajectory of life, not the horizontal line. What if the horizontal line is what we want? But the vertical line is what we would always want if we actually remembered what it was and what it was taking us to. But it doesn't need us to even remember it or want it. That's where we're going anyway. I, so it is our responsibility to take care of ourselves. That's the horizontal path, but it is not life's responsibility to take care of us in the ways that we want to be taken care of, to get to where we personally want to go, which is. Survival and pleasure and ease. Life doesn't owe us taking care of us in any of those ways because life takes care of us with a much greater goal in mind, which is our highest realization. And liberation from Samsara as a whole. And when I say life, I mean life with a capital L, because when we go through everything that we need to go through. That includes pain, that includes pleasure, that includes life and that includes death. All equally gifts taking us on the path that is our true path and taking us to where we will all arrive to and where some of us consciously want to get to. So what if every time we find ourselves on the horizontal path, we can realize that there is something that we are wanting basically to feel good. But there are two types of feeling good. There's the feeling good of pleasure. Which is temporary, which we get through wellbeing, and there is the feeling good that is not emotional or mental or physical, but that is the feeling good that is beyond anything that we can personally and currently imagine through the human perspective, through the egoic perspective, which is being love itself, being at one with everything, with all of life itself. And when I say life, I mean life with a capital L, which includes both incarnation and death. So what we really want, what we think we want is wellbeing, but what we really want is liberation. What we think we want is to get to the end of the horizontal path to get all the way to the right. Greatest pleasure. Basically, what we really want, whether or not we know it, is liberation, is enlightenment. And the good news is that that's where we're going anyway, independent of what we want or think we want or are aware of it all. So that's a grace right there. And yet what we're not that into is how it happens, which is through an equality of both sides left and right of that vertical line of balance, an equal inclusion of what we could call light and shadow or pleasure and pain. Or perhaps what we could call what we want and what we don't want, or what we like and what we don't like, so we can find where are we fighting life? And when we realize we're fighting life, what we're noticing is, okay, so I'm actually on the smaller line, the horizontal one, which is subservient to the vertical one. So let me get to the main road. Let me go from horizontal to vertical. What do I need to do in order to go from horizontal to vertical? I need to let go of my grip on control and on thinking that I'm the one that's doing everything and to go towards trust and surrender and allow for that searing vulnerability. For that searing feeling of helplessness and for the deep grief of allowing ourselves to let go of what we had been gripping because we are now going to be following trust and surrender. Instead, a lot of the horizontal line can be gripping the outcome that we want. Effort in pushing, competing things like that doesn't have to be, but all of those things are what we end up doing when we try to push our personal will through the horizontal line, allows us to maintain a false sense of control. With all of our ideals and trying to push life to somehow match itself to our ideals. That's what gives us that false ground that we like to imagine that we're standing on, even though it's not actually there. It's just a structure of our mental creation that doesn't actually exist because we don't want to look down and realize that we're not standing on anything. So there is a saying that is often shared in spiritual community that says that pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. So one of the ways that we turn pain into suffering is thinking that we shouldn't be feeling pain. So feeling pain is inevitable, but all of the stuff that we put on top of it is optional thinking that we shouldn't be feeling. Pain is our first turning away from pain. So now we're not only feeling, Hey, this doesn't feel good, or I don't like this, but instead now on top of that, we're feeling this should not be here, this should not be happening. Who says. That's us playing, God, that's us having some type of a righteous narrative where we know better than life itself. Why are we holding that narrative? Why are we holding that stance? Because it is so painful to actually just feel pain. It's easier to run from it by creating a narrative of shoulds that we can hide behind and point the finger somewhere, even if to ourselves, that feels like a higher sense of control than not having that whole mental mechanism of rules and rule breaking and blame and potentially punishment. There is none of that. That entire structure does not exist. There is no guardrail to transgress. Life doesn't have guardrails around you for you, that it has then transgressed and thus betrayed you by giving you a tough hand. There were no guardrails to begin with. There were no promises to begin with. Life wasn't like,"Hey, I'm gonna promise you that you get to have an easy life". No"life says, I promise you, I will take you to God." These are two very different promises. Thinking that life has promised you an easy life is a setup for disappointment, resentment, and bitterness. It's a setup for blaming yourself, blaming others, blaming life, blaming God, and potentially losing your faith because if you don't think that you or somebody else betrayed you, you're gonna put the blame on God and you're gonna say that God betrayed you, and you're no longer gonna have trust or faith. So you just really, really sabotaged your own spirituality through that thought mechanism. So what's the pathway home? What's the healing? What is the invitation? It's when we look at this XY axis to realize that the path to enlightenment includes both the left and the right sides of it. Equally, that life is going to go like a spiral going upwards around this vertical line. Sometimes it's gonna veer towards the left side. Sometimes it's gonna veer toward the right side. So we're basically seeing that everything that is to the left of the vertical line is pain, or at least more pain than pleasure. And everything to the right of the vertical line is pleasure. Or at least more pleasure than pain. Sometimes we're gonna experience pain, then we're gonna experience pleasure, then we're gonna experience pain. Then we're gonna experience pleasure, As we're spiraling up towards enlightenment So we're just gonna oscillate. Why? Because that is actually how life works. It's not an error in the system. It's how the system works in the first place. These are the real rules of the game. You want rules of the game. These are the real rules of the game. Polarity of pleasure and pain. Polarity of pleasure and pain equals life on earth. Life through the polarity of pleasure and pain together lead you not towards one or towards the other, but on a completely different axis that is perpendicular to both. We are not on the horizontal axis, we're on the vertical axis. We're not jumping left and right in order to try to decide which side of the horizontal axis we're gonna land on. Left and right are working together to take us forward on the vertical access perpendicularly on its own path. So pleasure and pain. Hold hands together as they walk you towards self-realization, away from suffering and towards self-realization. Pain and pleasure Together. Walk equally with us so that we can walk away from suffering and towards self-realization towards what some people call enlightenment, pain and pleasure, both holding our hands, walking us home. Now, how can we get home if we're constantly wanting to veer to the right and drive on the horizontal road? We're denying half of life and we're fighting God's path for us by trying to create a path of personal will. The horizontal line is a path of personal will. There is a place for our personal will in the sense of self-care doing we can to increase our wellbeing. I'm not saying drop all of that and don't take care of yourself, but I am saying that our personal will is subservient to the great will of that which is greater, I am saying that our wellbeing is subservient to the highest and best that the greater plan has for us, which means that sometimes we may feel a lot of pain or experience tragedy or calamity or loss or death. All of those can all be the greatest gifts towards our highest spiritual wellbeing, our highest self-realization, our highest unity with God. That's the seeming paradox here. Now, I'm not talking about this because it's easy. I'm not talking about this because it's easy for me. I'm talking about it because it's true. Now, when I say easy to do, what am I espousing here for us to do? It's for us to notice where or when are we in a stance that is a horizontal path stance. Now I'm gonna be more nuanced. there is a difference between our behavior and our worldview. Our behavior in the horizontal path is actively doing what we can for the highest and best wellbeing of our lives on planet Earth in the ways that we are capable of affecting through our behavior, through our personal actions. Preferably for all beings, and that is the act from the human being. Our worldview, though now we have a choice with our worldview. Is our worldview going to come from the lens of the egoic self? Is it going to be the human being worldview of the personal will? Or can our worldview exit the horizontal path and give itself to an alignment with the vertical path? So if you wanna keep with behavior and worldview, you can play with that word behavior and say that the vertical path reveals the behavior that life has towards us, the pleasures and pains that life brings us. The cards that life has dealt us. That's life's behavior towards us and our worldview is to stay in alignment with life itself. To stay in alignment with God's view for us, with God's will I. And then we can add one more piece, which is life purpose. So imagine we have two levels of life purpose. Our life purpose on the horizontal level would be aiming at the highest level of wellbeing for the individual lifetime. And for whoever else is around. The life purpose for the vertical path would be aligning personal will with divine will, so that our purpose is actually enlightenment even within the lifetime and across all lifetimes. So let's look at each one. So on the horizontal path towards wellbeing, this is where we put in our effort. This is where our personal will is. This is where we try to help ourselves and each other as much as possible. Now, of course, there are people who, when they hear highest wellbeing, they think only for me, right? Not highest wellbeing for everyone involved. So the horizontal path also includes people who simply want to maximize pleasure for themselves only, which means at the expense of others potentially. However, we can also walk this path of highest wellbeing on the human level, while including that word wellbeing to actually be about everyone. So it includes being aware of our impact on others, generosity, service, et cetera, not just hedonism or competition for personal benefit, right? So the clean, responsible, human level, life purpose is highest wellbeing for everyone. That's way beyond the personal desires of I wanna have a nice house, a nice car, a good job. That is acquisition, pleasure, hedonism, personal gain. Some of that stuff can be really great. I'm not saying lead an acetic life. I would like a lot of the things that I just named, but that can't be the end goal. If, if that's the end goal, then that's where we have an issue. Not only that, but how did you even arrive at. Whatever it is that you've attained, whatever it is that you've acquired, how many people did you step on, and how much of Mother Earth and her beings did you disrespect in order to get whatever you're now enjoying? So we need to look at where did we get here from, and also what are we leaving out if we think that this is our final arrival point. So the more responsible level of the human life purpose level would be always being aware of our impact on everyone as we attain whatever we're able to attain for our own personal pleasure and wellbeing, and sense of personal fulfillment, while at the same time the things that we are attempting to achieve being that which is in the highest and best for all beings, such as giving ourselves to a life of service, a life of going out of our way to help others, seeing ourselves as intrinsically linked with everyone else, and doing what we can to create the highest and best for all beings in this lifetime, in this world together within the physical reality that we are living in. Now, notice that this in and of itself is a spiritual life. As I had said in previous episodes, someone who is compassionate and generous is a spiritual person. I don't care if they're even aware of anything related to divinity or the spiritual path or enlightenment or anything like that. If you are living a life of generosity and compassion and service, that in and of itself is a spiritual life. So in the horizontal path, that can include praying for people, being spiritual teachers, working for the ascension of the planet, doing all of these very loving, caring, giving, even really esoteric things. But if we think that our personal will is the biggest game in town, and that whatever we are wanting with everything that I just said somehow deserves to happen, that is where we have lost God. That is where we have made ourselves a little mini me God, because our worldview has gotten stuck within this dimension of seeking lifetime related wellbeing but there's a bigger game in town here. So our will is not actually the point here. It's subservient to God's will, and that is why even when we pray for what we most want and deeply care about and yearn for and are very attached to, we do so always with this disclaimer you could say, which is, This is what I am really, really, really calling forth. But God, if this isn't your plan, I do your plan. Not that we're the ones who need to give permission to God for anything. It's gonna happen anyway, but our prayer is clean in that sense. We're not competing with what is or what is in the highest and best or what is the true path. So our behavior can always be on that horizontal path toward wellbeing, our behavior, but not our mentality, not our expectation, and thus not any sense of entitlement because, this is the idea of doing what we need to do or what is right to do, or what we feel called to do from our heart, while at the same time knowing that the outcome is not ours for the taking, it's beyond us. So that is a form of humility and it only comes through the gift of trust. Through the gift of trust, that is the only way that surrender comes. Surrender can only happen when there is something to surrender to. No matter how tangible or intangible it is. There needs to be a trust in order for surrender to happen. So in order for us to release personal will, there needs to be an understanding of whatever you call God. There needs to be an understanding that there's a bigger show in town than us, and that trust allows us to receive pleasure and pain as equal teachers, as equal guides, as much as our human self does not like this. And then when the pain comes, it's not laced with all of this judgment and disappointment and resentment and self blame and blame towards others, and all of the rest that leads to suffering. It's lighter, it's cleaner, and it's held within our psyche and within our heart in a way that doesn't necessarily have ease by any means, but that does have deep, deep down some kind of ground or some kind of peace. Why? Because even while the pain is happening, we can feel ourselves being held somehow, so that's our path, the vertical path. Our true life purpose, our spiritual life purpose, better said, is walking the vertical path. So in this way, we can now see the two levels of life purpose, right? One of them is the horizontal purpose: increasing wellbeing for everyone. How we apply ourselves in life. Like I protect my children, I do my service to my community and so forth. How we make our decisions, how we apply ourselves, where we spend our time and attention and energy. And then the spiritual level of life purpose is learning to open our hearts to life as it is. So that we can be in presence so that we can no longer fight life, but instead of become life's children the way we always have been, allow ourselves to be life's children, allow life to be our full teacher and give ourselves with surrender and trust and faith through all of life without turning away, but turning towards trust. So that we can be taken through whatever is thrown at us and go deeper and deeper into the heart of God, We don't need to know where we are going. We don't need to know how it all works. All we need is the trust to remember that we are never seeing the full picture. And that there is always more if we let go into it. And all we need is the trust that it will take us home. thank you for being with me in The Ground of Love. You can follow this podcast to receive the next episodes, and who is it that comes to mind to share this episode with? Who Could Benefit? Is it a family member? A friend, a client, who would be inspired, reminded of what matters to them by being in our energy that we've shared here today. So please go ahead and pass this along to them and go ahead and leave a review or a rating if you wish. I thank you for that. For other offerings that I provide, you can go to the ground of love.com I also provide one-on-one healing sessions and I will also be offering a group membership. All of that is on the website, the ground of love.com. Blessings to you. May you be protected, held, regenerated centered. And taken forward with all light, love, truth and highest and best health and wellbeing on all levels and taken forward to make the greatest, most beautiful impact doing exactly what you're here to do. God bless you. Protection, grace, protection, grace. So it is.