Have you ever noticed in your life that when you avoid difficult or painful events/situations, you are also narrowing the options available to you in your life?  By avoiding the painful situation, you gain the short term benefit of feeling more comfortable, but you also are not gaining any of the benefits you would have incurred if you had stepped into the uncomfortable situation.  It is a trade off right?  Think about how this applies to your own life.

Living your life is a lot like building a house.  You need construction material, say bricks, and you have plenty of these “bricks’ lying around.  They are your experiences.  These include your thoughts, feelings, sensations, and memories.  Some of these bricks are nice and pleasant.  These represent all your pleasant thoughts, feelings, memories, and sensations.  Then there are the unpleasant bricks.  These can look dirty, seem nasty, you might wonder if they are structurally sound.  These represent the hard things in your life.  Unpleasant or painful thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations, and so on.  They are there wether you want them or not.

What happens when you decide to only build your house with the nice bricks?  You have less building material.  You will have a smaller house.  And say there are are some nice bricks next to a pile (or even under) some of the painful bricks.  If you wont’ deal with the painful bricks, those nice bricks are off limits to you.  So you have even less building material.

Lets say you are ok with having a small house.  That is fine for a while, but what happens when you want to leave your house?  There is still all the painful unpleasant bricks laying around.  You would have to walk over them or past them. You could soon become trapped in your house of nice bricks.  A pretty big trade off right?

What would happen if you were ok with using all the bricks you have in your life to build your house?  The good and the unpleasant.  Suddenly you can make a bigger house.  You can leave your house.  You have more options to expand your house.  How does that sound?