Rosie: Learned to move through my boredom

Learned to move through my boredom by Rosie

I experienced the feeling of boredom to its peak and then overcame it

For a period of up to a year or so at the beginning, I felt so bored about my life that I kept thinking about going back to work or finding something to get myself occupied. That feeling intensified when I spent more time with myself. I would start judging my life and myself as boring. I would start comparing my current life with some imagined more interesting lives just to convince myself that I was indeed a boring person living a boring life. And my mind told me at the time that the solution to get out of this boredom was to earn more money and go experience all the interesting lifestyles that so many people were talking about out there. 

With the guidance of my teacher, I later realized that to escape the boredom loops, especially in the context of spiritual awakening, it is not helpful to keep running away from ourselves to look for something interesting from the outside world to comfort us. But instead, there are some practices that can help me keep my boredom at bay and even utilize it to find direction about myself.

When I feel bored, my mind would be occupied with many thoughts. These thoughts often hold some patterns and can be categorized as follows. 

1. Fun things I did in the past that I could be doing then
2. The version of myself that I could have become
3. How to earn more money and grow rich
4. Interesting places and activities that I could try some day, from watching social media
5. A ‘better’ life that I could be living now instead of staying here and doing nothing or doing ‘unimportant things’ like this

For my case, feeling bored implies I am holding some expectations about a better scenario and comparing that against my current situation. Boredom is the result of that comparison. “If I was doing that thing, it would not feel this boring”. During this period, to cope with boredom, I turned to games, movies, series, job searching and further studies. I remember during that phase, I missed my time living abroad so much that I kept comparing the two lives and ended up judging this current lifestyle to be too boring. But the truth is even when I was living abroad before that I still could not escape the feeling of boredom.

The first breakthrough happened when I managed to sit through my boredom without feeling too bad about it for the very first time. After that my resistance against boredom lost its power over me. It still comes back after that, of course, but less and less often. Until one day I realized that it had not visited me for quite a while. When boredom can no longer hold much power over me, joy comes much more easily and naturally. I could also utilize the opportunities when boredom visits to observe my thinking patterns and find some hints about other unresolved or unhealed problems.

For many people at the beginning of their spiritual awakening journey, boredom gives them a good push to go explore first their inner world and second the whole vast spiritual realms that lie beyond the 3D world that they have identified as the only truth they could accept. For me, going through this state peacefully and harmoniously helped me put an end to these loops in my operating system and eventually remove a great source of distraction from my spiritual journey. Eventually, boredom is one of the main causes for why a person cannot feel joyful and energetic as they cannot enjoy their presence and get carried away by a world of imagination that could comfort their boredom.