Mary Schiller credits Sydney Banks' 3 Principles for freeing her from decades of suffering caused by an abusive marriage. She discovered that suffering comes from thoughts she believes, not from what actually happened. Once she saw her thoughts as random and untrue, she could stop creating pain.
Hello, hello, and bonjour, or I should say bonsoir since it's evening here in Paris, France. This is Mary Schiller, author and coach of MarySchiller.com, and this topic today on this Facebook Live is all about suffering and the fact that suffering is optional. I was thinking about this today as I was out and about and realizing that I spent a lot of my life suffering. And that is an interesting realization to have. Hi, Shirley. And it's an interesting realization because one would think that maybe I would be angry or upset about that, kind of looking back and realizing that I spent a lot of my life in a feeling of suffering. But I don't feel that way because I now see suffering in a very different way from the way I used to see it. So I was considering what causes suffering. And it seems to me that one of the causes of suffering is seeing life as out of one's control entirely, meaning we're in situations that we can't change or in circumstances that we can't change. And so we see those situations and circumstances as impacting our lives. And if we can't change them, then we begin to suffer. We think that they are causing us a problem. And if we can't change them, then that problem seems bigger and bigger. And this can be in the form of anything really, another person who seems to be making us miserable, or a job, or in my case, you know, I felt like my suffering was a result of events that had occurred in my life previously. So in thinking of myself, a lot of my suffering came from the ultimately mistaken belief that the only way I could alleviate that suffering was to undo my past. So I spent my 20s in a very violent marriage. I got out of the marriage, but the abusive behavior unfortunately continued for another, gosh, I guess 11, 12 years. And so it was a long time that I was dealing with all of that. And even at the time, I really saw my only way out of that would be to jump into some sort of time machine and erase the past somehow. I couldn't figure out any other way to end my suffering. I was never suicidal or depressed or anything like that, but it's easy to see how someone could get to that point if, for example, they had been through something traumatic like that, like I had, and they, you know, felt like their suffering was continuing as a result of it and they didn't see any way out. Well, what I discovered in 2014 when I came across what's called the 3 principles that were articulated in that way by Sydney Banks was that my suffering was not coming from anything outside of me. It was all coming from thought going through my mind that I just happened to be listening to and believing. And I can't overstate the power of that realization because what happened, it took me about, I'd say, 4 weeks or so of really immersing myself in these 3 principles and to really get this point that in fact I was creating my own suffering, that my suffering was not because of anything that had occurred in the past. It wasn't because of my ex-husband or anything that had happened to me. I'm not excusing his behavior or anything, but I am saying that the suffering that I was dealing with, I saw very clearly was coming from my own thinking that I was listening to and believing and kind of buying into. And so I remember this so clearly because I realized it one day and I was like, oh, well, shoot, I can just stop doing that then. I can just stop. Creating my own suffering. That's a pretty easy solution. Thank goodness I don't have to go back in the past and undo my decisions. I don't have to, you know, confront my ex-husband, or I don't have to do anything except realize that I've got some thinking that I'm listening to, and that's it. So you may ask yourself, well, how did you just— or you may ask me, how did you just sort of turn that off? And actually what happened was I couldn't turn it off. I couldn't just turn off all of that thinking. I just saw it for what it was. I saw it as fairly random. I saw it as not true. And after a while, I started kind of laughing at it because it was like, you know, who do those thoughts think they're talking to? Don't they know who I am? They're trying to impose all this suffering on me and I'm just not buying it anymore. And it all had a much lighter feeling about it. It didn't seem so dire and horrible anymore. It started to look sort of comical to me that all those years I had been creating all this suffering simply because I was listening to some thinking. So getting back to my very first point as I close this out, when we understand that we are anything but powerless that there isn't just power within us, but that we are the power, that there is no power but us, that is an incredible realization. There's nothing that has to change out there. There's no circumstance, there's no situation, there's no person or anything. Nothing has to change to alleviate our suffering. We can do that very easily ourselves simply by recognizing that we're generating that suffering. And we can just not do that anymore. We're free to not suffer. Suffering is optional. There's nothing to be gained through suffering at all. People are not meant to suffer. And I know that that goes against a lot of conventional wisdom. But I see nothing to be gained by suffering. I don't think that's how human beings are meant to live. So I'd love to know what you think. Please feel free to post your thoughts and comments wherever you're watching this video. And thank you so much for watching. I hope you're having a wonderful day today. I'll talk to you again soon. Bye now.
