Just like anyone else, lots of athletes fear loss and pain. Learning how to stop being afraid of loss and pain is a subject that’s very personal to me. Everyone has suffering in his or her life but not everyone deals with it the same way. For the purpose of this article, I’m focusing on those who have a fear or anxiety around loss and pain. To resolve it, I’ll tell you how I used a Buddhist-like approach to help shift my mindset and let the fear go. This, ladies and gents, is about using a higher perspective to change negative thought habits.
For starters, stop bullshitting yourself. When you find your mind focusing on what you could lose, stop yourself. I tell myself, “stop bullshitting yourself” because to me, that’s really what I’m doing. What follows in the rest of this article are the thoughts that come after to support my theory that I am in fact bullshitting myself.
Even people with nothing to worry about have something to worry about.
Everyone wants what they don’t have and people with anxiety worry needlessly about what it is that they don’t have. It’s part of the cycle of an anxious mindset. I bring this up first because it was important to me to look at life this way to gain an understanding that everyone has suffering and pain.
For example, poor people suffer because they want more money; rich people suffer because, well, mo money mo problems as Biggie said. People without jobs might be desperate to find one and people with jobs might be desperate for free time. People want to be famous and adored; celebrities want anonymity and privacy. Athletes want to be champions; champions want less pressure.
The point here is that whatever you are worried about or seeking to fulfill, someone is one the opposite end of where you are daydreaming about some form of what you have.
Detach.
This duality of opposites is a Buddhist principle called the Eight Worldly Winds in which each of the winds is a pair of opposite experiences. They are:
- Pleasure and Pain
- Gain and Loss
- Praise and Blame
- Fame and Shame
We are so attached to pleasure, gain, praise, and fame—even more so in today’s social media look at me I’m perfect, always happy, and successful society—that we feel that anything less is failure. Attachment causes suffering.
Let go of your attachment to the good and to the bad. When you hold onto to either too tightly, you identify with it so deeply that anything else in opposition causes suffering.
If you’re too attached to being perfect and living an idealistic lifestyle, anything that doesn’t equal up to that causes suffering.
If you’re too attached to something that caused you pain (I’m not talking about healing, I mean not letting go), you identify with pain as a part of who you are and your experience, and therefore may have a difficult time accepting good things into your life.
Pain and loss are inevitable. Be the tree.
“Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow come and go like the wind. To be happy, rest like a giant tree in the midst of them all” ― Buddha
The giant tree is symbolic because it remains rooted but that doesn’t mean that to be like the tree your life has to remain unmoved or without progress. Trees grow, and their roots grow deeper. Being like the giant tree means letting the life around you—all of the things you can’t control—happen while you remain steady and growing as the winds of life blow through your leaves. Now of course, you and I are not trees and we have this thing called emotion, but trees sway without falling, right?
The reality is that it doesn’t matter what you do, life is going to happen and the only thing you can control is yourself. You can’t always control your experiences, however because those depend on other people and circumstances, but you can control your reaction. You can be sad and go through hard times without suffering. I’m still learning this, by the way.
You can feel without letting it overtake your life, without beating yourself up, without questioning what you did to deserve that pain, and without reliving it over and over again. You don’t have to wear your losses like a scar at the forefront of your everyday life. I think that’s where my own anxiety of fear and loss stems from because I’d do anything not to feel certain losses and pain again. But, all I’m doing is robbing myself of the moments that are good because I’m worried they are going to go away. I have to remind myself to be the giant tree. Be brave.
I also want to note here that some trauma requires that you work with a mental health professional to process it. I strongly believe that deep trauma is not something anyone should have to heal from on his or her own. It’s okay to ask someone for help watering your tree.
Be satisfied to achieve happiness.
The final point that I think is crucial is that we think that to be happy, everything has to be perfect around us and we have to be a perfect individual. Not true. Stop it.
I’m here to tell you that being average, with its ups and downs, is a really good thing. You certainly have certain gifts that you excel in, but you don’t have to be perfect in every area of your life. This is important in getting over a fear of loss and suffering because being satisfied with where you are in any given moment is a form of happiness. There are lots of wins you can celebrate on your way to any goal that you have, even if the wins aren’t related to whatever it is you’re trying to achieve.
Live your life the way you choose to live it letting the eights winds blow without taking responsibility for the direction of the things you can’t control. No one wants to feel heartache or as if their livelihood is at stake and no one deserves to feel that way day in and day out. Life is too special. Follow your intuition and do your best without being attached to any specific outcome. Be free.
And finally, I also like to remind myself that not everyone I love is going to leave me. Love is safe.
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