Why am I suffering is irrelevant in the face of the question, “Who Am I?”
What you are is not suffering. What you are is untouched by your thoughts, your beliefs and your stories about how broken you are, how messed up your life is, how the world is unjust and how you got the shittier end of the deal.
What you are is most likely not being recognized, even though it is all there is.
Why is your true nature not being recognized by you? This is actually irrelevant. Who would recognize your true nature if your true nature is all there is?
Energetically self realization is the abiding or non-abiding experience of the energy that is focused in thought ceasing and falling back into itself as God, energy, awareness, Love – whatever you want to call “true nature.”
Through religion, spirituality and centuries of concepts humans have come to project an image onto what God or awakening is, what it feels like, what it does, how it changes your life. This idea is grasped – held on to and thus it is misunderstood that what you are never needed to be looked for. It was simply a relaxing back into ones own being – one’s own beingness.
Quite often, this is a frustrating message. “How the hell am I suppose to recognize this when I’m angry?” “Or grieving” “Or bored” “Or heartbroken”? On the one hand, what you are is everything. So you are all these things just as much as you are that which you’ve come to understand as peace, love and bliss. The difference is that post awakening there can no longer be any real identification with the shifting temporal states of experience. Whether that’s emotional or mental. Point blank – it’s just like watching a movie. Furthermore, someone who’s had an awakening can be really annoying and difficult to deal with. An awakened person is not necessarily this image of perfect and divine bliss. Sure, there is an underlying unbroken peace evident in an abiding awakening such as what we see with Ananda Moyi Ma or Ramana Maharishi, but in most cases the falling away of identification undergoes a process of adjustment. The energy that described itself as “suffering” is now layer by layer undoing years of conditioning and lies. This just seems to be a natural byproduct and result of realization. Arguments or conflicts with an awakened human can be really confusing. An awake individual will feel emotions fully and completely, however they’re also able to drop the experience almost instantly.
In awakening, very little can be held on to. Awakening really is about loss not gain. It is impossible to gain anything with a true awakening.
That which is suffering is a dream. Suffering is the holding on to life. It is the continual attempt at gain.
So, “What do I do when I am angry or grieving?” you might ask. A great practice that I’ve heard multiple teachers refer to is the energetic shift and focus from the anger onto the space in which the anger is happening – the backdrop of awareness. This doesn’t mean that you can’t or won’t feel the thoughts, beliefs and emotions behind an experience like grief or anger. However, the more consistently the energy is shifted and refocused onto its spacious, vast, still and unmoving back drop the easier and more effective the process of reconditioning will become.