The Liberatingly Fruitless Search for a Cure

Try This: Give yourself a pep talk out loud. Put some oomph into it. Pour some dried beans or ice cubes into a container and shake it like a cheerleader.

“What makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured.”
~ Charlotte Joko Beck, American Zen teacher and author

What is the unbearable “it” that can’t be cured? As a Zen teacher, Joko Beck is likely talking about pain. “It” can mean any kind of pain: a backache or sadness or being stuck in traffic.

In this life, there is no lasting cure for pain. Yes, maybe your backache or sadness will go away. Maybe traffic will lighten up. But you will most certainly experience backaches, sadness, and heavy traffic again, probably over and over and over.

Still, humans spend an awful lot of time trying to outrun pain, trying to find a “cure” that will work, once and for all. And we make ourselves miserable in the process.

If you’re in addiction or mental health disorder recovery, you know this truth up close. It’s probably been drilled into your head: There is no cure for addiction. There’s no cure for mental illness. These conditions can be managed, but you have to work every day to keep yourself on track.

Pain is part of life. Nothing you do or learn or gain or achieve will guarantee freedom from pain. No diet or exercise regimen, no amount of knowledge or money can “fix” you. Does this mean you give up, let yourself fall back into active addiction or mental illness? Do you stop recycling or doing yoga? Do you stop volunteering in your local soup kitchen?

It’s up to you. We all have our own level of capacity when it comes to pain-free living. If you’re born with a predisposition to chronic illness or addiction, or if you grew up in an abusive or trauma-laden environment, your capacity to free yourself from physical, mental, emotional, or financial pain is diminished.

It can be hard to accept this truth, much less to embrace it. Even so, we’re going to look at the freedom that can be found in doing just that: in being okay with the fact that you can’t be cured. In being okay with this person you are right now, on this earth.

The Freedom of No-Cure:

You can try without trying so hard. In other words, continue to do the work that helps keep you sober and mentally healthy, but take that work one day at a time. Look at your life as a fascinating journey of learning–not a journey to perfection.
You can accept yourself for who you are. Maybe you’ll never be as “put together” as the people around you seem to be. Maybe you’ll never be as happy as you think you should be. Let go of the “shoulds.” Be friends with yourself.
You can look for the humor in your journey. Of course you will make mistakes. Of course you might swing from one extreme to the other. Of course you will feel like you rarely get it exactly right. This is human experience. Try to detach from it a little bit so you can look at it with a sense of humor.
You can let go of guilt. Another quote from Joko Beck: “It’s of no use to look back and say, ‘I should have been different.’ At any given moment, we are the way we are, and we see what we’re able to see. For that reason, guilt is always inappropriate.” Don’t waste time wallowing in guilt.

Finally, you can realize that how you live, how you feel, how you cope, who you choose to spend time with, how you choose to make money–it’s all up to you. You are the creator of your life.

But wait, you’re thinking. 1) Bad stuff happens to me all the time, 2) I don’t have the ability to make as much money as I would need to create the life I want, and 3) everyone around me needs or wants things from me, and I can’t just abandon them.

You’re right. All of us have blocks that can make us feel like we have little control over our lives.

Related to the idea that our lives are “incurable” is the fact that we do not have control over external circumstances. There is no cure, and you can’t control everything that happens to or around you. Can you find freedom in not having control? Try and see.

The Freedom of No-Control:

You can release blame. Stop blaming yourself, and stop blaming others when things don’t go your way.
You can stop trying so hard to make everything into your vision of the ideal.
You can focus on your response to circumstances and people. What you DO control is how you react.
You can decide what you need to maintain a sense of wellbeing and contentment. If everyone around you is falling apart, you can decide to step back and take care of yourself. This is not selfish. It is part of the freedom you can claim when you accept that you cannot control how others act or think.

It’s not easy to release the attachment to cures and control. But it’s harder to labor under the belief that cures and control are possible. As always, freedom has a lot to do with letting go of things you can’t control–and in working with who you are right now rather than wishing you could be better.

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