Endings: How to End Things That Are Difficult to End

[gentle music] The word that I chose for this week is the word endings.

Endings.

I've been going through, um, as we all have, lots of endings.

We keep on, uh, ending and beginning things.

It's a cycle, so I have my little...

I'll put this in the, um, notes of our, of our circle, that we...

Ending isn't sort of like the end of a thread or the end of a line.

There's beginnings, and then there's middles, and there's endings, and we keep on going around and around and around that cycle of continuation.

And if you think about an ending for yourself that you are going through right now, maybe, um, you're in the process of ending something or beginning something or something has come to an end, what I've discovered for myself in my own process of ending but also in working with many, many clients is that we're not very good at it.

We're not very good at it.

We, um, we tend to get psychologically inflexible at the end of things, and, and that psychological inflexibility shows up in our attention.

We get...

We replay over and over again the past and what if we had done this differently or that differently, would it have ended differently? Uh, we get caught up in our, in our feelings that like, "I can't do it.

This is too painful.

I just wanna rush through it," right? Um, or, "I wanna skip over it," or, "I wanna ignore it." Uh, we get caught up in our thoughts.

We add so much story to the ending of things, so much story, and, um, we get caught up in our sense of self.

We get...

We're identified with something and over-identified with that thing and can't see ourselves as fluid and changing over time.

Self is context.

And then we also, um, lose track of our motivation.

So one of the things, um, that I ended was this in-person sangha, and what you...

If you were watching me through this process, you would've seen me in all these things, right? Of, of the difficulty to let go and the ways in which I was staying on too long.

You know? Like, you know in your body, like, this is, this is, this is coming to an end.

But you-

you-You keep on going and the way in which your motivation gets co-opted, in which you are no longer pursuing your values, you're pursuing something else, which may be a motivation just to keep it, the chase, the attachment.