Yeah, that's about right. There isn't some "other way" that allows us to avoid life, but we can get smarter about how we relate to it.
This is the classic realization: all the things that "aren't suppose to happen" like injury, bankruptcy, illness, loss of fame, mistakes, etc. are happening all the time. It's a non-negotiable part of life. But it's not a personal failing, it's life. (Which is why Buddha's first truth: things ain't perfect, is scary yet comforting.) Some of that stuff is beyond our control, but our relationship to it, our worldview, can become more mature and resilent.
So one of the main goals with practice is "how do I bravely face the difficulties in my life, yet avoid creating unnecessary problems?" Trying to create perfect system (desire for deliverance) and freaking out when we realize it isn't possible (re-observation) never works, but usually we have to watch our mind go through DFD and RO many times and see for ourselves that it's basically more freaking out. Totally normal, no big deal. But after we are conscious of DFD and RO, once we have "knowledge of DFD" and "knowledge of RO" then we are able to relax all those freakout habits and just sit.
Usually there is some emotional content, feeling the freaking out and then feeling like we want to cry when we realize there is no hope... but then --- if we have done our practice right -- then our giving up turns into equanimity. EQ is simply not fighting when all of these habits of freaking out pop up into the mind. We watch our mind do it's thing without getting dragged into the drama.
Here's the main caution: if you go too fast into this stuff, then you just retraumatize yourself and further encourage the freak out. You need to be kind to yourself, explore bravely, but also respectful of what you can handle. It's okay to sometimes practice for shorter periods or to take a break for a while. Similarly, if you go too slow by try to ignore the freaking out by saying "oh, it's nothing. Shargrol says it's just a freak out, I don't need to pay attention" --- then you don't really learn the lesson of these nanas. You need to experience what is happening. You need to become intimate with your own mind, even if it is freaking out, and create a safe little space for all your freakouts to emerge and be welecomed and witnessed. The freakouts just want to be heard. They want to communicate their concerns. You basically want to say "it's safe for you to freak out, I'm listening to you, but I'm am not going to totally freak out. I'm going to sit here and watch the freakout come and go. And if I need to take a break, then I will."
Hopefully that makes sense. A lot of times we start meditation hoping that it will "get rid of" the stuff we don't like about life. Instead, it helps us become wiser by fully experiencing the things we don't like, by seeing the truth and the false in our normal habits of mind. Our minds want to be able to see the truth of life clearly and live a much fuller life as a result. We truly want to live in the real world. But our minds also want to protect ourselves from ever encountering anything dangerous or scary. So it's a balance of being able to see things as they are, without creating a lot of unnecessary drama.
Meditation is creating a safe environment to look into our self-protection habits and explore what it might be like to drop some of our protections --- but we need to do this gently and respectfully otherwise we'll just keep reliving all the freak outs.
Hope this helps in some way!
