“Cultivating habits that distract us from understanding the real sources of our pain can be very attractive to some of us. Discovering the real sources of our suffering takes not only hard work, but genuine intention to end suffering. Not all of us are ready to let go of what propels us into habitual ways of thinking and living. We have the tendency to hold on to anything that is familiar and makes us feel comfortable, even when in actuality we are extremely uncomfortable. Of course, it’s not that we like to suffer—we’d just rather maintain our conventional way of thinking, which accepts unnecessary suffering as something normal.
It is true that we are conditioned to experience pain in this life; however, most of our suffering is self-created. An example of this is how convinced we are that happiness will come someday with hard work, even if the hard work makes us unhappy every day before we get to our goal. What we don’t realize is that suffering now and expecting happiness in the future is like running a marathon to have a guilt-free moment of enjoyment with delicious, high calorie foods.”
Valeria Teles, in “Fit for Joy”
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Jeff Maziarek, author of Spirituality Simplified and Codi’s Journey, launched Pondercentral.com in April 2007 as a Web-based forum for “PONDER on THIS,” a series of weekday inspirational email messages he began sending to subscribers in March 1999. A FREE service since its inception, “PONDER on THIS” provides subscribers with meaningful content to assist them on their individual paths of spiritual growth. In addition, it benefits subscribers, authors, and publishers by including links to Amazon.com where subscribers can learn more about the book being quoted, and also purchase it.
