4. How Do We Respond To Pleasant And Unpleasant Events?

How do we respond to pleasant and unpleasant events? 

The exploration of our reactions to everyday pleasant and unpleasant events reveals habitual tendencies which we all have: 

• We like pleasant events and we want to grasp hold of them, cling to them, make them last for longer or come back. 
   
• We don’t like unpleasant events, and we want them to end or go away, we try to get rid of them, push them away or numb ourselves so we don’t feel them. 

We react in the same way if these are external events or internal experiences. In this way we can feel tossed about by life: not so much by the experiences themselves, but by our reactions to them. We can end up believing that we are entitled to pleasant events and that we should be able to avoid the unpleasant ones: especially if we are careful, if we are good, if we do the right things in life. When things go wrong, we can get caught up in beliefs that it is not fair, that it shouldn’t be happening to us, that we are being punished, and so on. We forget that despite our reactions or our beliefs, life is full of experiences that we will sense as unpleasant, pleasant or neutral. And that all of these experiences are part of life! The variety is what gives life its texture and its depths. 

However, what would it be like if we didn’t compound our difficulties with strong habitual responses of reactivity, that turn unpleasant experiences into suffering?