Are You Looking for What's Wrong? Breaking Free from the Habit of Discontent

Have you ever noticed that even when things are going well, there can still be a part of you looking for what's missing, what's not working, or what needs to change before you can finally feel at peace?

In this episode of Recover Your Soul, I share a teaching from Pema Chödrön's book How We Live Is How We Die that has stayed with me for weeks: the propensity for discontent.

The phrase struck me because I could see how often many of us move through life carrying an unconscious habit of looking for what's wrong. We think that if we could just fix the relationship, heal the wound, change the circumstance, or get to the next goal, then we would finally be okay.

But what if peace isn't waiting on the other side of everything changing?

What if the invitation is to become aware of the lens through which we're already seeing our lives?

In this conversation, I explore the Buddhist teaching of the kleshas: attachment, resistance, and delusion. These are the habitual ways we become disconnected from our peace and our true nature. As I share in the Recover Your Soul process, these patterns often show up as our unconscious beliefs, stories, fears, judgments, and attempts to control life around us.

Together we'll look at how attachment keeps us grasping for things to be different, how resistance keeps us fighting reality, and how delusion can keep us trapped in old stories and misunderstandings that prevent us from seeing ourselves and our lives clearly.

This isn't about pretending everything is fine or pushing away difficult feelings. It's about learning to be present with what is, while bringing more awareness, compassion, and curiosity to the patterns that create suffering.

The beautiful gift of this work is that the very places where we get stuck can become doorways to wisdom, healing, and awakening.

In This Episode:

• What Pema Chödrön means by "the propensity for discontent"
• How the habit of looking for what's wrong affects our happiness
• Understanding the three kleshas: attachment, resistance, and delusion
• The connection between Buddhist wisdom and the Recover Your Soul process
• How our patterns, beliefs, and stories shape our experience of life
• Learning to witness difficult emotions without judging ourselves
• Why awareness is the first step toward healing and transformation
• How to find greater peace in the present moment, even when life isn't perfect

My hope is that this episode helps you become a little more aware of the ways you may be searching for what's missing and instead begin noticing what is already here. We are all learning together how to release old patterns, soften our judgments, and reconnect with the wholeness that has always existed within us.

As always, thank you for being part of the Recover Your Soul Community. It is an honor to walk this healing and awakening journey with you.

The Recovery Your Soul Podcast courses and content is for educational purposes only and is not affiliated with or representative of any organization, recovery group, or religion. And reflect the personal experience and opinions of Rev Rachel Harrison and her guests. RYS claims no responsibility, any person or entity for any loss, liability, damage caused or alleged to be caused, direct or indirectly by the use application or interpretation of the information presented within. 

Transcript

Propensity For Discontent Defined

Rev Rachel Harrison 0:00

There's a groove that we can fall into without even knowing it. And it's a habitual pattern to see what isn't working, a propensity for discontent. And it's incredibly powerful because it conditions us to look for what's missing, wrong, incomplete, not enough. And even when life is good, we see what isn't. And we are looking for what isn't quite right. Or is there a problem to be solved? Or shouldn't I be further along? Or is there something more that I could be doing here? We can get caught in this discontentment that can keep us stuck in old habitual patterns, our old stories or old beliefs. And recover your soul, we're learning how to awaken to these aspects of ourselves because there is a different way to be. If you are looking for what isn't working, you will find more of what isn't working. If you want to grow and heal in your life, you switch the lens in which you see yourself and the world around you. And there is magic that happens in that. It is a spiritual journey. Today we're going to be talking about this inspiration as I read the book by Pama Chotrin called How We Live is How We Die and the concept of a propensity for discontent. Enjoy the episode. Welcome to the Recover Your Soul podcast and community, a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life. My name is Reverend Rachel Harrison. I started Recover Your Soul after having profound changes in my life from my recovery of alcoholism, codependency, people pleasing, and to control addiction. I was guided to share the tools and principles of spirituality and the recovery soul process to help others transform their lives as mine was transformed. For us to overcome external circumstances, we need to turn the attention to ourselves, focusing on our interchange and healing. Positive results in our lives will follow. Welcome to Recover Your Soul. I'm Rip Rachel. Thank you so much for coming and spending time with me here today. Today I want to talk about a line that came out of a book I'm reading by Pay McHotran called How We Live is How We Die. And the line was around the propensity for discontent. And I could not get that phrase out of my head for a week now, the propensity for discontent. And I don't want to talk about it because I think that this is so aligned with the work that we're doing in Recover Your Soul. And I want to bring in some of the Buddhist elements that come from her discussions, her teachings, and some of the parts that I think are really powerful in terms of us learning how to work with ourselves and how to be kind to ourselves. One of the things that we're learning in Recover Your Soul is that you can be okay when the people and the world around you are not okay. And it's so important

Why This Fits Recovery Work

Rev Rachel Harrison 2:55

that we are with our feelings. We're never trying to dismiss our feelings. We're never trying to say that how you feel inside or what's coming up for you isn't important because it's incredibly important. And it's really the only place that you have control over is to understand what's happening within yourself. This is your healing and awakening journey. It's a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life. And whether you use the recovery your soul process or another process, it doesn't matter because you're here and you're already on a path that is around giving you more understanding about these repetitive unconscious systems that have been running within us that have kept us discontent. I have a spiritual group that I lead once a month here in Colorado with a girlfriend of mine, uh Rev Kristal Jukowski, and we call it the Soul Journey Collective. And in the morning we have a sacred circle. It's the first Saturday of every month. And then in the afternoon, we do a spiritual book study, which is new this year. And it's been really fun to go into these spiritual book studies where no one's the teacher. We're all just learning and growing together, and we choose a book each month. And this month we picked Pama Chotran's How You Live is How You Die. And the reason why we picked it was because the last book had been Michael Newton's Life Between Lives and talking about where souls go in between

Pema Chodron And Book Study

Rev Rachel Harrison 4:20

lives. My mom, being Buddhist, who attends the group, was saying, Well, I'm curious about how this goes with the Bardos, which is the Buddhist philosophies of what happens after your soul leaves your body and what happens after that. And so we ended up picking this book, thinking that it might be a nice, a nice spot between the two to look at the metaphysics, to look at the Buddhism. And one of the things that I was reminded of is Pema Chotran, if you're interested in any of these philosophies, is a magnificent teacher because the way that she writes and the way that she thinks is so aligned with how we've all been indoctrinated and taught in growing up. And then understanding the Buddhist principles and philosophies and techniques from this Western mind that has this real um desire to really heal and be okay. She had, and she talks a lot about how she had a lot of upset, she had anger parts of herself, she had discontentedness, and she really had a mind that was busy and had a lot of anxiety and she really struggled. And so when she started doing these practices, part of her was uncovering patterns, beliefs, and stories, which is why I think this is so great, aligned so perfectly with the recover your soul model, which is for us to step into more compassionate way of being with ourselves so that we're not living unconsciously. So we're not in repetitive, unconscious behaviors that no longer serve us, do not align with us. And if your life is what you think and feel and believe, we are actually creating our reality through how we show up in our own life. And so if we are in discontent, we might be bringing more discontentment to us. And that can be a hard pill to swallow sometimes. And I've said that before because I think that when you're in the midst of it, and when I was in the midst of it, um, man, I was definitely not in a place where I thought, well, you know what I should do is I should look at myself and how mind works, how my mind works and how I am choosing to see it. I for sure could really only see that I was discontented a hundred percent with my family, with

Kleshas Craving Aversion Delusion

Rev Rachel Harrison 6:45

my husband, with my circumstances, with everything that was going on with me. So one of the things that she talks about in the book that um is something that I'd heard about in Buddhism but had kind of forgotten about are the kleshas, the three primary klaishas they're called. What klashias are is um a way to describe the the places where we get hung up. And what I think is really cool is that when you start looking at these philosophy, when you start looking at these philosophies between different spiritual teachings or different religions, you'll find that there's so many intersections. It just comes at it from a different languaging. So the key is to find the languaging that works for you and to step fully into what that is, and also at the same time to be open to listening to it from different perspectives, different vantage points, because everybody might have a little place to lean into and understand more. She said the three klass are attachment or craving, right? This is that grasping, wanting, clinging. This is what I talk about in step two of recover your soul, which is letting go of control. It's that part of us that we think we have to hold on and grab on tightly to every single thing. God forbid we're not holding on tightly. Well, one of these is the Kalatia that is giving us uh discontentment. The other one is aversion, resisting, hating, pushing away. And this is another place that we can look at these almost as protectors, which is a lot of what we talk about in recover your soul, that we have these, these um reactive, unconscious mechanisms that we do that are trying to protect us in some way from what is hurting. So this aversion, the pushing things away, the um resisting, resistance is such a huge piece of many of us that we're working on of being resistant. And the other one is ignorance or delusion, misunderstanding reality, especially believing in a separate permanent self. I probably am not going to go into a lot of that, but if you really think about like sort of this this ignorance, sometimes we're just shut down. We don't, we don't want to see. But there's this opportunity to open our eyes and to see more clearly of what is. And what we're learning in the spiritual world is how to let go of judgment, how to release our attachments, how to stop resisting, right? And then also how to let go of that part of us that that wants to be closed, that wants to have delusion, that that doesn't want to know. Um, man, denial was such a big piece of how I attempted to protect myself in my dark years, denial of my own addiction, denial of how hard it was. And even though I was in so much pain and so um, oh, those years were so dark with my husband and his drinking and my kids and their struggles and everything that was happening financially, emotionally, spiritually. I mean, just fights every day. It was just so hard. So sometimes you have to give yourself permission to understand that there'll be moments in your life where you might use some of these as protectors because it's all you've got in the toolbox at those times. And I think it's important that you give yourself grace if you're in it, or if you've been there. And part of this is just opening your eyes enough to see that there is another way that you can move in your life and in your mind and in your soul in a in just a slightly different way. So this concept, the propensity for discontent that just kept going into me so hard, the reason why I think I related to it so much was twofold. One was I had a propensity for discontent. I had this part of me that couldn't see the circumstances that were actually happening in my life. Even the, even the hard parts. I think this is, we're not trying to say that there's some ideal. Like if I'm actually trying to say more than ever, it isn't about there being an ideal. It's about us being able to be present with what is and be able to look at every situation with more neutrality of what is actually happening and be able to look at it in a more clean and clear way. So that instead of a propensity for discontent means that you have a lens that you already have slid down that you're looking through, that no matter what's happening, whether it's something lovely or not, happy and not good, it's already looking for what's missing, it's already looking for what's not right here. It's already fact-checking, it's already protecting, it's already restricting. This piece of discontent is wanting everything around us to be something other than what it is. And so even if it's good, we can find what isn't good. And I think this is the part where we have choice. We have more choice than we give ourselves credit for. And I'm often amazed in myself at how differently I feel in my life. Yesterday I had a weird hard day for no reason, right? I don't even know what it was. Maybe it was just the astrology, maybe it was I was tired, maybe it was my energy levels, maybe who knows what it was.

Real-Life Examples Of The Lens

Rev Rachel Harrison 12:35

But as I was having this day where I was just irritable and I was kind of off and easily discontented, I thought, you know, in the past, I would do a lot more looking around to say, oh, it's because Rich said this, or this is happening, or this is in the news, or this particular thing happened. But the work that I've done over the last eight years that's been so powerful made me have so much more gentleness to myself and to just allow me to have a hard day and to not judge me or to judge anyone else. So I turned in and I thought, is there something going on? Because sometimes I can be in the delusion, right? I can be in the place where I'm not actually seeing it. And the real answer was no. There is nothing that's actually quote unquote happening in the field that I need to look at. It's really me just needing to give myself a break to have an off day. And that's movement because I think we want to figure it out all the time. And the discontentedness is often our judgment, our wanting to have things be something else. Everywhere that you put your energy is either leading you in a in a positive direction or it's pulling you back. We are we are never in a space where it's just standing still. We're either moving towards love, moving towards our wholeness, moving towards growth, towards expansion, or we are kind of sliding back into fear and into protection and into our old systems or old beliefs, patterns, and stories that feel like they're the ones that connect and protect us, but really they're they're disconnecting us. So part of this process is to maybe notice that there's a red flag if you're feeling discontented. Because the discontentment might actually be an opportunity for you to look at what you are feeling in a way that you maybe didn't see before. We get what we think about. Just this morning, Rich was commenting again about some of his health stuff that's going on. He rode his body hard. He's about to turn 60 years old this year. He snowboarded and skated and uh did construction and uh every sport that you could imagine. And he ripped his ACL um motor crossing. And I mean, he has just run his body so hard. And, you know, bodies don't last all that great, you know, by the time you get to this age. So his knees are really hurting and he's got some lower back stuff and he gets really sad about it. And I never want to take away from the truth that this is what his body feels like. But we had a conversation about the power of thought that if he becomes have a propensity to his own discontentment about his body, he's actually gonna be drawing towards himself more body issues. He's gonna not even see when he feels better because he's always gonna be looking for when he doesn't feel good. Well, what doesn't feel good today? And how did I sleep last night? And what did that and you start concentrating on what isn't working? And you know what you're gonna find? You're gonna find more of what isn't working. Does it mean that he doesn't have pain? No, of course he's having pain. That is true. Does it mean that you dismiss it and pretend it doesn't exist? No, of course you don't do that because that's ridiculous. But you can witness it, you can think about it, you can have awareness around it, you can um see it in a way that allows you to do something about what there is to be done about it. And then you move your attention over to what does feel good, what is working, what what you want more of. Ask the universe for what you want more of, because you get what you're asking for. And so one of these concepts around the

Turning Kleshas Into Wisdom

Rev Rachel Harrison 16:50

discontentment that I think that is so important, and this is what Pama Trochan teaches. So I want to say what she teaches because I think it goes along so much with what we've been learning in Recover Your Soul. What she says is when a glacier arises, you notice it. And that's what I'm saying, even with Rich's body. It's like you can notice it. Or yesterday, I was having a hard day, I was having an off day. You notice it, then you refrain from automatically acting it out, really leaning into it, oh, complaining, complaining, complaining, or denying it and pushing it away. There's this really beautiful witnessing that we can do for ourselves that will open up the space for your higher self to come in and give you the messages that it needs to give you, because you're here to learn. You're here to learn and to grow. And then it says we stay present with the energy of it. Stay present. The more that we're here now, the more that we're in this moment, the more that we're touching in with ourselves in this moment, which sometimes means giving yourself some grace to have an off day, or rich touching in with his body and then not pushing it or not doing something that is gonna aggravate it, or taking care of what it needs to be taken care of in that moment. And then it's she says, and I love this because I think it goes with what we're what we're talking about. The Klacia becomes a doorway to wisdom rather than a source of suffering. How we feel is how we learn about our experience. And we are here to have experiences as souls. We came into body to have experiences that you can only have in this form. This journey that we're on, especially right now, where we're learning so much more about us on a completely different level as a mainstream than ever before. I continue to have this messaging around the concept of the power of our thoughts, the importance of creativity and creation, the importance of us turning in, seeing our wholeness, experiencing our light, understanding that these feelings that we have, these off days or these difficult situations that we are going through, legitimately going through. It's not about pushing them away. And it's not about becoming victims in them. It's about being present in them in a way that is empowered, that is um whole, that is around you understanding more about the gifts that you have. And we are releasing and letting go of these old repetitive systems that we have come from that bring us into this, this um, this discontent, this propensity for discontent, this this way of being. And I I had this vision earlier of like all those kind of um grumpy aunties or family members or people down the street or someone that you know who you just see them, and every time you see them, you know, they have a laundry list of everything in the world that's not going right for them. They have a propensity for discontent. And you get around those people and you don't want to be around those people, and they say, you know, I don't understand when this is gonna stop, but all they talk about is what isn't working. Well, I did that on my marriage. All I talked about was what wasn't working in my marriage, what wasn't working in my husband, what I didn't like about him. And I guess what? I got more and more and more of that. And all I could see was what wasn't working and what I didn't like. I continue to say I'm I'm not actually sure if Rich has really changed as much as I think he has, because I see a different person. I experience a different person because I'm a different person. I had a propensity for discontent. And now I have a propensity for light. I have a propensity

A Propensity For Light Choice

Rev Rachel Harrison 20:55

to see the goodness and the wholeness and everything, and to expect life to show up for me. One of my mottos that you've heard me say when I'm traveling, especially or trying to figure things out, is everything's working out for me. Everything's working out for me. And we have that story about being on the airplane, and I sit down, and the woman next to me, uh, we start chatting, and then they say, Oh, the plane's gonna be a couple hours later because of something. And she said, Oh man, this always happens to me when I travel. Nothing ever goes right when I travel. Propensity for discontent. And I said, Really? Hmm, I actually have decided everything works out for me when I travel. I definitely want to make it all go smoothly. And the guy comes on the line and says, Well, I'm not really sure what's going on, but they've given us permission to take off. Did I have the power to change the flight? Probably not. But it's this opportunity to recognize that we can choose. And if you can choose, what are you going to choose? What are these klass? How are they showing up in your life? What are your protective mechanisms? How are they showing up in your life? How can they be a doorway to wisdom instead of a doorway to suffering? This process is about gentleness to yourself. It's not about judging yourself and saying, oh, I haven't been doing it right, or I don't know what I'm doing, or I'm not where I'm supposed to be. That too is part of these kalatias, that attachment, the judgment. We're actually in this place of saying, hmm, how can I be more curious? How can I see this from a different perspective? How can I see this through the eyes of love? How can I look at myself with more compassion? How can I see my people and my life through the eyes of love more? Not love in the conditional love, but love in the compassionate open space that allows everyone to be exactly who they are. And in the end, we're giving ourselves the time, the attention, the love, the compassion, the gentleness, the grace, the healing that we so desperately want and we deserve. And all you have to do is open up to yourself and let it in. Ask and you shall receive. It's not from all those people in your life, it's from your own higher self. I just wanted to talk about that line because it meant a lot to me. And I am so grateful to not have a propensity for discontentment anymore, at least most days. We're doing this together. And I encourage you to step into the community in whatever way works for you, or another community that might work for you. We need each other's support and love to be able to move through this because it's pretty complicated. Pretty complicated in the world and in our families. And surrounding yourself with people who can see you in your wholeness is one of the greatest gifts and one of the greatest moves that we can make to be able to see ourselves from wholeness and to be able to walk a new path too. Until next time, Namaste. If something that you just heard resonated with you, I want you to know there's a whole community waiting for you. The Recover Your Soul process is a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life, and there's many ways to walk it together. Start with the free mini workbook at recoveryoursoul.net. It's a beautiful first step. You can join us for the free monthly support group on the first Monday of every month. And if you're ready to go deeper and work the nine steps, you can join the self-study collective or a soul circle or come to one of our in-person retreats or workshops. And if you want to work with me personally one-on-one, coaching is available. You can also find bonus episodes every Friday on Patreon, Apple Podcasts, and I'm on YouTube with new videos that are posted weekly. And

Support Options And Final Words

Rev Rachel Harrison 24:55

grab your copy of the new Recover Your Soul Spiritual Memoir. It is a spiritual journey of healing from addiction, codependency, and people pleasing available on Amazon, and it's our journey of healing through this process. You can follow me on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and all of it is recover your soul. Just remember you're not alone in this. Together we can do the work that will recover your soul.