3 Ways We are Conditioned to Remain in Suffering

The definition of suffering is, “the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship.” This can be emotional, mental, or physical. What if I told you our suffering is due to the social conditioning implemented into our entire upbringing?

Below we are about to discuss the three major ways we have been conditioned to remain in a state of suffering once we’ve reached adulthood. After reading this, I hope many are enlightened and further dive into entering a spiritual awakening. After all, the only way to become spiritually awake is to let go of the limiting thoughts we once had.

Your Paradigm is Flawed

Every person who reads this has a paradigm. A paradigm is a model we keep inside our mindset. It’s a pattern or example that has been instilled in us since we were small children.

Our paradigm is constructed through what our parents, schoolteachers, and other authoritative figures tell us while our minds are still moldable. Eventually, we grow into adults who have very concrete ideas about life and what it is we are capable of because of how we have been programmed.

The only way we can shift our paradigms as adults is to undergo a spiritual awakening, in which, we accept and understand much of what we have been taught has been the reason for our hindered success and happiness in life.

As easy as it would be to blame the people who raised us, it comes with enlightenment, that we learn paradigms are passed down from generation to generation and are just a patterned mindset that ends up trending within our family line.

Great examples of paradigms instilled in us as young children are:

*We will never be the type of family who is wealthy.

*You NEED a college education to make money and be successful.

*We are always the type of people who will be treated unfairly.

*You need to work extremely HARD if you ever want to make money.

*Your grades in school determine your intelligence.

*You need to work 5-7 days a week so you have a good 401k and can comfortably retire when you’re finally 60 years old.

*Life is painful and hard.

*Miracles happen few and far between.

*It’s so and so’s fault you feel the way you do.

These are just a few I can think of off the top of my head, and I’m sure many of you are shaking your head “yes” to one or more of them. These paradigms are all thought processes that brainwash you into limiting your truest potential.

When you let down your defenses and reflect on what you grew up learning you can finally pinpoint what paradigm you have been living your life through. (For more info on paradigms, visit the Manifest tab on my homepage.)

Eventually, we can adopt a new paradigm. One where there are no limitations. One where everything we have ever sought is now within our grasp. One in which we see the world and our life through an entirely different lens.

You Regularly Tune into the Media

If you grew up anything like me, then your folks clicked on the news and submerged themselves in the world’s problems for 20 minutes before getting you out the door for school.

It becomes natural with age that we immerse ourselves in the latest news. Whether it be political news, local news, worldwide news, celebrity news, etc. we make it part of our everyday routine. But why? Is it because we are taught that that is what you do as an adult? Or maybe it’s because you’re genuinely curious?

To make matters worse, we have access to the media 24/7 through our phones and social media, so you never miss a beat!

What we do know is nine times out of ten the news is negative. Disaster, drama, and conflict naturally draw people in. It makes us curious, gives us something to gossip about, and seems to give us this sense of importance (especially if the story hits close to home.)

While many people believe they are just keeping themselves informed, what they don’t realize is they are programming their minds with what they are constantly feeding to it every day.

Take the Covid pandemic for instance. Thousands die every year from illness. Some years are worse than others, but the media rarely covers the stats.

One day the media decided to take hold of the Covid story. It put people into a panic. Many feared for their lives if they stepped outside, they refused to get with their families for holidays, and there was worldwide conflict over the matter, till one day, in just 24 hours, Covid restrictions were lifted, and no one talked about it anymore because the media set the focus on a NEW subject (Ukraine), which reignited conflicts around the world.

When you become spiritually awake you realize that the media has an agenda. Unfortunately, it has little to do with accurately covering stories and aiding in the greater good but has everything to do with money.

The more viewers, the more ratings, which funnels more money being made. The more people believe everything they see on the news and allow themselves to be triggered by it, the more cash flow and collisions continue to thrive surrounding that particular subject. Until it eventually fizzles out. Then a NEW massive topic takes over headlines, and the cycle continues.

When you construct a story that will bring misery to a mass amount of people, you naturally create suffering within the population. And when you constantly plug into that suffering, you naturally allow it to manifest within your personal life. When you allow it to exist in your personal life, you will always have people butting heads, which keeps the story alive but never provides any real solution.

Listening to the media and allowing it to control your emotions will always keep you in a level of suffering without ever gaining the chance to experience true elightenment.

When we accept that cruelty, illness, and suffering are constantly part of our world and not strictly what the media decides to cover, we can put more energy into actively making a difference in this world, and not just find ourselves complaining about it.

Never Taking Accountability

I talk about this subject far too often, because it was one of my many hurdles to overcome. It infects so many people’s mindsets it’s uncanny. The blame game is an infectious ideology that spreads like wildfire.

Blame is the easiest excuse for negative emotion. It gives us a free pass in how we react to something, because if someone or something MADE us express this negative energy then we do not have to hold ourselves accountable for it.

This might seem like a great idea, but when you utilize blame for the negative areas of your life or your feelings you are just dousing the pity party fire with gasoline.

When you don’t take ownership of every action and reaction that you have, you refuse to look deeper at what it is you are harboring within yourself. You have planted a garden of suffering deep within your mindset, and you continuously fertilize it whenever you add a new “reason” to why you said or negatively did something.

The simple truth is a feeling is nothing more than just that. A feeling. Happy, sad, angry, hurt, excited, offended, etc. These are part of being a human being and we choose what we allow to make us feel certain ways. No one can force you to feel the way you do. Most of what we feel is due to how we handled past experiences and what emotions we’ve attached to those memories.

Once we take ownership of ALL of our feelings, past and present, we can then understand the reaction that follows any of these feelings is also of our own free will.

Finally, when we learn to allow a feeling to be felt and then let it pass without negatively letting it impact us, we can pinpoint WHY we might be triggered or feeling a certain way. And then we can get to the core of our suffering without continuing to plant more of it.

Accountability is a very hard concept to own, but once you do, peace begins to enter your life and triggers slowly begin to dissipate all together.

When you start to understand everything I have discussed here, instead of resisting it, you open the doors to a spiritual awakening. You begin recognizing the amount of power you’ve had inside yourself all along and with that, we discover our soul’s purpose and begin to see the world in a completely different light.