While growing up we internalized distinct likes and dislikes, and when our parents told us how even the dislikes held value, we didn’t care: we didn’t want them anyway.
We experienced ourselves as being at our parents whim and mercy to some extent. They had the final say in what we did, and if we disobeyed, there were consequences. And when we did resign ourselves to doing those things, we did them with a negative energy. Upon reaching a certain age, most of us probably rebelled some, railing against that percieved power and trying to assert our rights and have a say in our experiences.
And into adulthood that mentality lingers. We want what we want, and if we don’t get it, we have a tantrum or we sulk or we cry or we shut down, but in spite of momentary defeats we continue to forge ahead until we get what it is we want or avoid/escape what it is we don’t want. The moment we suceed, we feel a sense of empowerment, but it doesn’t take long before we find ourselves struggling once again with the world’s percieved power over us.
This pattern of seeking what we want and avoiding what we don’t want is nothing more than a conditioned process that sets us up for unhappiness. With that mindset, even when we get what we want we are still unhappy: sometimes because we want something else now and sometimes because that thing didn’t make the difference in our lives that we thought it would.
More often than not, the real cause of our unhappiness is simply the process that led us to believe that “thing” was what we liked in the first place. Until we examine that primary process, we will continue to look to the things of this world to bring us the happiness that can only be found within ourselves.
But in conditioned patterns of wanting, what we are really saying is that we are not complete or good enough without that thing, so how can we find happiness within ourselves if we don’t feel complete? It may sound counterintuitive, but we need to spend time finding the value in those things that we don’t want in our lives. We need to open to those things that we would otherwise choose to be rid of entirely in order to break through those conditioned patterns of likes and dislikes.
There is joy in everything, we just need to shift how we look at life in order to find it. Once we are able to find the joy in a previously joyless thing or activity, we start to loosen those rigid preconceptions of ourselves and the world that we’ve been carrying around since childhood. Then it gets easier to find the joy in other thing as well.
It’s only after we are able to reexamine those likes and dislikes and find the joy in all things that we can relax into having preferences for or against things. From this mature, expanded perspective, all things and experiences are recognized as valuable, and so nothing holds the unhappiness that it was once believed to.
Embracing our dislikes and choosing them as if we had chosen them from the start is one key to our ultimate fulfillment. Those very things we sought refuge from become the very key to our liberation from the conditioned thought that led us down a path of unhappiness. In that moment of grace, we take back the power we had unwittingly given to the things of this life when, in our childhood, we started labeling experiences with likes and dislikes.
