Remove the thorn, get to the heart of the problem
I realize how much effort I put into ignoring my problems. I procrastinate on all my tasks until the very last moment, and allow myself to build up unnecessary anxiety and stress. I’ll do anything and everything to not deal with the main priority, and will distract myself endlessly until I can’t avoid it anymore.
It’s not like I don’t know it’s an important task. Whether it’s studying for a final exam, writing a blog post, or starting a personal project, I understand the importance and the consequences that follow if I fail to deal with these tasks.
It’s so tempting to avoid the tasks and indulge in something right now. I tell myself that I could finish them anytime, and I end up binge watching something on Youtube. I crave instant gratification so I take the easy way out, but I can never enjoy the videos whole-heartedly either.
Every hour that passes by, my anxiety goes up and the looming deadline slowly creeps into my consciousness. Instead of facing the problem, I’ll open more videos, and search for more content to distract myself even further.
This repeats until you physically feel uncomfortable distracting yourself any longer, and you make the decision to either sleep and ignore the consequences or to finally start on the task.
This is how I’ve been feeling for the past week. I’ve been dealing with problems in my life where I felt helpless, and to distract myself I’ve been indulging in anything that will take my mind off them.
My mind was not in a good place, and it spread to every aspect of my life. I started to neglect writing because I was heavily discouraged by the problems in my life. The foundations and principles I was following for the past few months were crumbling.
I started getting impatient with everything in my life, and if I wasn’t getting quick results, I started to grow wary of them and saw them as pointless. I started reacting emotionally, not deliberately.
Only when I saw this excerpt from Michael Singer’s book, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself, was when I started to see things differently. My problem was brought to light and I could finally face the problem that was crippling my mind.
Michael Singer tells us to “Remove our inner thorn”. We all have ways to deal with our thorns, and sometimes we think we have pulled them out completely when instead we merely cover them.
“Imagine that you have a thorn in your arm that directly touches a nerve. When the thorn is touched, it’s very painful. Because it hurts so much, the thorn is a serious problem. It’s difficult to sleep because you roll over on it. It’s hard to get close to people because they might touch it. It makes your daily life very difficult. You can’t even go for a walk in the woods because you might brush the thorn against the branches. This thorn is a constant source of disturbance, and to solve the problem you have two choices.”
You can either make sure that nothing ever touches the thorn by protecting it, or you can pull it out. Most of us believe that the first option will solve everything, but it ends up controlling our lives. The thorn affects every part of your life and the more you try to protect it, the more you have to cater to it.
Maybe we’ve convinced ourselves that we don’t have this thorn in our lives. But maybe that’s because we’ve built a life around protecting it. We adjust our lives to make sure that nothing will touch the thorn, and we never find out what the core problem is because we’re not even aware that it exists.
“The truth is, the thorn completely runs your entire life. It affects all your decisions, including where you go, whom you’re comfortable with, and who’s comfortable with you. It determines where you’re allowed to work, what house you can live in, and what kind of bed you can sleep on at night. When it’s all said and done, that thorn is running every aspect of your life. It turns out that the life of protecting yourself form the problem becomes a perfect reflection of the problem itself.”
We understand the pain that comes with touching the thorn. It’s scary to pull it out because we know that it hurts, and it’s unpleasant to even think about it. We try to do everything else to distract ourselves from facing that pain, and invest all our energy into avoiding it when we can simply get it over with by pulling the thorn out.
My problem is relatively insignificant compared to what others are facing. My thorn was small, and was merely an inconvenience that we all face everyday. The solution to dealing with these thorns is to be aware of them and to not avoid them.
Many people deal with thorns that are way bigger and way more painful compared to my thorns. Their thorns have been controlling their lives for a long time, and it’s not going to be easy to face them, let alone pull them out. I’m not going to compare my trivial problem to the problems that others are dealing with.
Many of us are okay with avoiding these thorns, because we don’t want to deal with the pain that we are so familiar with. We avoid the thorn because we know how it feels to touch it, and we certainly don’t want to go through that experience again.
But I believe that the initial pain of pulling it out will certainly be worth it in the grand scheme of things. You have the ability to finally get rid of the problem that was controlling you. You have to accept the pain and discomfort that comes with the thorn in order to remove it.
“Do not doubt your ability to remove the root cause of the disturbance inside elf you. It really can go away. You can look deep within yourself, to the core of your being, and decide that you don’t want the weakest part of you running your life. You want to be free of this.
You want to talk to people because you find them interesting, not because you’re lonely. You want to have relationships with people because you genuinely like them, not because you need for them to like you. You want to love because you truly love, not because you need to avoid your inner problems.”
How do you deal with the problems and priorities in your life? Do you face them right away or avoid them? Are you aware of these problems or are you unaware?
Look to see if you have inner thorns, and see if you’re avoiding them instead of pulling them out.
