Read Online Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life by Ezra Bayda - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Ezra Bayda
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house, he finds his wife knee-deep in her own stuff. And what she wants to do is talk to him about it!
It is likely that this man will react, with some form of anger. Depending on what strategies are habitual for him, he might start blaming her: “Why don’t you ever have time for me? This is how it always is!” and things will go downhill from there. Or maybe his strategy is to push the reactive feelings down; suppression is his pattern. Or maybe he has the strategy of martyrdom; he just seethes and wallows in his righteousness.
The strategy we choose is going to be based on reactions. Our reactions are based on our expectations. Furthermore, we always believe in our reaction as “the truth.” That’s all we see. We rarely even see the difference between our expectations and our behavioral strategies. It’s usually one confused mess.
When we can see the relationship among our decisions, expectations, reactions, and strategies—not as the truth but as the fabric of our substitute life—we can then understand what we bring into the situation. In the example above, the whole setup in the first place was the decision “My mate should take care of me.” The disappointment came from the basic setup of that expectation. We can understand how this dynamic works only when we really start looking into ourselves—at our own decisions, our own strategies.
Then what we need to do is stop following our particular strategy of behavior. Whether it’s to blame the other person, to justify our own stuff, to suppress, to wallow—whatever its flavor—we refrain from following that strategy. This is not to simply modify our behavior, to make us act like a “better” person. It’s so we can then experience the actual emotional reaction that we’re feeling. But to practice in this way requires the willingness to just be with our experience, even when it’s painful.
In this case, suppose the man is experiencing some form of anger. If he really can stay with this experience of anger—hearing the believed thoughts and feeling the sensations of the emotion in his body—it’s likely the anger will subside. Another emotion may emerge as he takes the elevator ride deeper into his being; perhaps the emotion of hurt will arise from a layer underneath the anger. Then, staying with that, he might be able to go further down to some deeper layer where he feels grief, a sense of sadness and loss. Staying with that, perhaps he will be able to go even further, touching in with the feeling of the fear that underlies so much of our emotional experience.
It takes repeated efforts to stay with and experience our reactions in this way. But if we do it, practicing like this will eventually take us back to the original “hole,” whatever it is: feeling separate, abandoned, utterly hopeless, full of fear and dread. Only by uncovering and entering this dreaded part of ourselves can we see through the artificial construct of our substitute life and ultimately reconnect with awareness of our basic wholeness.
Are we willing to move out of the fantasy world in which we see practice as some vague and romantic union with silence? Are we willing to do the painful work of looking at what we do, how we react, how we follow mechanical strategies that lead us to close off, shut down, lash out? Once we can clearly articulate our core decisions and basic strategies, the next stage—residing in the hole that these decisions were meant to protect us from—becomes more straightforward and less dramatic. We can see through and experience our “suffering,” not as high drama but as just our “stuff”—the energy of deeply believed thoughts and deeply held bodily sensations. Our life then becomes more workable as we discover that what we thought was the deepest, most negative truth about us is not really as solid as we believed.
We can come to see— to experience —that we are not broken, that we were never broken, and that we don’t need to be
It is likely that this man will react, with some form of anger. Depending on what strategies are habitual for him, he might start blaming her: “Why don’t you ever have time for me? This is how it always is!” and things will go downhill from there. Or maybe his strategy is to push the reactive feelings down; suppression is his pattern. Or maybe he has the strategy of martyrdom; he just seethes and wallows in his righteousness.
The strategy we choose is going to be based on reactions. Our reactions are based on our expectations. Furthermore, we always believe in our reaction as “the truth.” That’s all we see. We rarely even see the difference between our expectations and our behavioral strategies. It’s usually one confused mess.
When we can see the relationship among our decisions, expectations, reactions, and strategies—not as the truth but as the fabric of our substitute life—we can then understand what we bring into the situation. In the example above, the whole setup in the first place was the decision “My mate should take care of me.” The disappointment came from the basic setup of that expectation. We can understand how this dynamic works only when we really start looking into ourselves—at our own decisions, our own strategies.
Then what we need to do is stop following our particular strategy of behavior. Whether it’s to blame the other person, to justify our own stuff, to suppress, to wallow—whatever its flavor—we refrain from following that strategy. This is not to simply modify our behavior, to make us act like a “better” person. It’s so we can then experience the actual emotional reaction that we’re feeling. But to practice in this way requires the willingness to just be with our experience, even when it’s painful.
In this case, suppose the man is experiencing some form of anger. If he really can stay with this experience of anger—hearing the believed thoughts and feeling the sensations of the emotion in his body—it’s likely the anger will subside. Another emotion may emerge as he takes the elevator ride deeper into his being; perhaps the emotion of hurt will arise from a layer underneath the anger. Then, staying with that, he might be able to go further down to some deeper layer where he feels grief, a sense of sadness and loss. Staying with that, perhaps he will be able to go even further, touching in with the feeling of the fear that underlies so much of our emotional experience.
It takes repeated efforts to stay with and experience our reactions in this way. But if we do it, practicing like this will eventually take us back to the original “hole,” whatever it is: feeling separate, abandoned, utterly hopeless, full of fear and dread. Only by uncovering and entering this dreaded part of ourselves can we see through the artificial construct of our substitute life and ultimately reconnect with awareness of our basic wholeness.
Are we willing to move out of the fantasy world in which we see practice as some vague and romantic union with silence? Are we willing to do the painful work of looking at what we do, how we react, how we follow mechanical strategies that lead us to close off, shut down, lash out? Once we can clearly articulate our core decisions and basic strategies, the next stage—residing in the hole that these decisions were meant to protect us from—becomes more straightforward and less dramatic. We can see through and experience our “suffering,” not as high drama but as just our “stuff”—the energy of deeply believed thoughts and deeply held bodily sensations. Our life then becomes more workable as we discover that what we thought was the deepest, most negative truth about us is not really as solid as we believed.
We can come to see— to experience —that we are not broken, that we were never broken, and that we don’t need to be
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