The Quality of the Journey

I have a stye in my left eye that is just not going away.

My relationship with this stye for the last three weeks has been a struggle. I have anxiously seen two doctors one after another and got different medications, in an effort to get rid of it as fast as possible. However even after diligently applying the medications prescribed to me, I woke up everyday, only to find it looking the same as the day before, or growing even bigger and redder. With the physical persistence of it my disappointment and worry grew - “Didn’t the doctors and Google tell me that a stye should go away in a week? Why is it still here?”

Then one day, my friend suggested that the reason that the stye was not disappearing may be because of stress. Since then my relationship with the stye got even worse, as I started to adopt a narrative that my stye was there because of stress. So every time I saw it in the mirror, I started to think of different events in my life that were contributing to my stress, and now the stye was no longer just a stye, but a physical symbol of my stress.

I was desperate to get rid of it. I wanted this ugly thing gone. Yet, this morning again, I woke up to see it still there, redder and bigger than ever. I was overwhelmed.

In my stormy state, I went to my yoga class. In the class, we sat in a sitting pose and patiently observed ourselves. With an understanding of where we were at, we meticulously adjusted the various parts of our body to compose the pose with intention. It wasn’t about getting somewhere impressive, like a more difficult balancing or inversion pose, but it was about being present and paying attention to the quality of the moment we were in. It was about bringing an intentional quality to the practice.

It was then that I realized that for the last three weeks, I hadn’t given my stye the same quality of attention I was giving my body then. I was simply preoccupied with getting rid of it because it represented something ugly in my life.

When we have something unwanted in our life, whether it may be unpleasant feelings or events, most of us have a tendency to fixate on the outcome of trying to eliminate it because it doesn’t feel good. In some cases, we amplify the event or feeling by recruiting other stories to feed the unpleasant feeling/event even more. I reacted to my stye by engaging in both of these behaviors, which led to a lot of struggle. What if instead, when we have something unwanted in our life, we pay attention to the quality of the journey we wish to have with it and bring it to life?

With my stye, this might mean letting go of the strict timeline I put on the stye to disappear and accepting that there are some things in my life I cannot control. This might mean shifting the story of the stye from a symbol of stress to just something that showed up. This might mean to choose to not look at it with disgust, but with acceptance and choosing to tend to it with care from moment to moment.

We have a tendency to be obsessed with outcomes but what we often forget is that we spend most of our lives in the journey leading up to the outcomes. If we shifted our attention to the quality of the process each and every moment and chose to reflect the quality we wish to bring to it, perhaps we can experience our life with more ease. Our intentionality can be reflected in simple everyday tasks, in how we interact with each other and how we practice, bringing what is important to us to their quality. This is especially important when unpleasant events and feelings show up in our lives, because it is during these moments that our intentionality easily gets lost.

With every event there are multiple possible stories we can recruit and multiple ways in which we can respond to it. It is our choice what the color of our path will be.

With this thought, I am setting an intention today to meet my stye with patience and care as long as it stays with me. What is the quality that you wish to bring to the journey you have with something unwanted in your life?