From time to time we come to a stuck place … After a while, the doing, fixing mind gets to the end of what it can accomplish and becomes the problem rather than the solution. Then we get stuck. And that sense of stuckness spins out into blaming our apparent self, our system of practice… we assess our character, our heart, our history, our past, our flaws, and our virtues. We fidget, become distracted, and jump to conclusions that will cement the stuckness into a situation...We can note that the stuckness, having eluded our attempts to get rid of it or gloss over it, takes us to an ‘edge.’ We want to hold on to some identity, or to a conviction in our practice tradition, but we can’t quite do it. We are taken to a place of uncertainty, a place where there is a feeling of not being anything solid but where there is still a hankering to be something. This is the edge.
The stuck stuff captures and convinces by its power to stimulate the mind… [but] if we can see them for what they are… these energies won’t stick. We realize that the stuck state is just a pattern of energies that we weren’t fully aware of; and when that fullness of awareness is brought to bear, the self is taken out of it and it becomes unstuck. And it takes us to a [place that is] more intimate and comfortable than our personalities.
Ajahn Sucitto
The purpose of meditation is to develop a sane relationship to experience. The struggles we have in life – shutting down, pushing away, feeling overwhelmed, and all the neurotic attachment — arise from the confusion we harbor about how to relate to the rich energy of the mind. When eating, we ingest, process, and eliminate food. But how do we digest our experience? It’s not so clear…The practice methods […] are designed to bring us into a sane relationship with our experience. As the great Tibetan Buddhist master Tilopa said to his disciple Naropa, “Son, it is not experiences themselves that bind you, but the way you cling to or reject them“
All of us, without exception, have been thoroughly conditioned to react immediately to what is happening in and around us by thinking about it — talking to ourselves and to others in judgmental ways, often repeating these thoughts over and over again. Thoughts evoke emotions, tensions, excitement and stress, and can bring on exhaustion and sickness. Awareness reveals this simply to be so. Awareness is freedom from wanting to improve oneself or to put oneself down. It … opens one up to whatever else is happening this instant: breathing, a bird singing, a motor humming, the wind blowing, thoughts moving, the body tensing and relaxing…
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
Anyone who’s interested in meditation in the first place probably already senses that we are all in a mess, the human mess, and that we have no choice but to clean it up. People who are ill — with heart conditions or cancer or stress-related illnesses or simply greater-than-average unhappiness — or people who have been forced to recognize the inescapable truth that life isn’t easy and smooth, that it inevitably brings problems, that going along with business as usual as if none of this were so is simply not sustainable. Such people have realized that life is always in crisis, not only for them but for everyone. Meditation practice helps us to face this crisis as it really is and nourishes our process for working on it.
In meditation we learn to become familiar in a positive way with how our mind works. Our mind becomes open, inquisitive and supple. We’re comfortable looking at ourselves honestly. We’re not too hard on ourselves, but at the same time we’re becoming wise to our little tricks. We know how we get slippery. We know when we’re about to buy in to habitual reactions such as anger or jealousy. At some point we have the strength and discipline to make a choice about how we’re using our minds. We can be open to alternatives beyond the knee-jerk reaction. We can say, “Traffic is bad, but I don’t always have to be irritated. I can choose a different response.”
