Below is a blog post from 12 years ago and am experiencing similar currents passing through me and the same solution applies. Sometimes I just forget that; moment by moment, month by month and year by year, etc.

SATURDAY, MAY 16, 2009

It seems that the past is coming up in patterns that I didn’t expect at all. I get blindsided by my karma at times.

Some things that drove me into emotional despair as a younger man have reappeared and are jerking me around emotionally as much as they did when I was young.

What is particularly interesting is that even though I can filter these new/old feelings through meditation, as well as experience and see them for what they are; I can’t just wish them away. They have a tenacity that is startling.

So, the practice laid out in front of me is to go very carefully in exploring these feelings, letting them come and letting them go; to be still when they arise so that I don’t do or say anything that will cause discomfort to others. Sounds easy enough but so far has been rather painful to adhere to. Painful in the sense that there is suffering when not getting what one would like to have and generally thinking that the world is, all in all, rather unfair in springing youthful inclinations on me at this late-ish stage of my life.

Luckily I’ve had these experiences before. Just about the time I think that I’ve got a good grip an some aspect of my life that I’ve found troublesome in the past it crops up in a slightly different form. Nevertheless, the same.

That in fact is, I suspect, the basic teaching that may be arising here.

It’s taken a really long time for this collection of habits to have arrived at this particular time and place in this particular body, they can’t be just brushed off or ignored. They are asking for help (yet again), and seemingly the only help I can truly give is to be still and have the faith that stillness is sufficient to help move this from the problem realm into the solution realm. Consequently having more freedom to move forward from this very spot which, just moments ago, seemed so fixed and permanent.

P.S. May10, 2021 The three major aspects and causes of suffering that Buddhism points too, are Greed, Aversion and Delusion.