Reflect. Learn. Keep Going.

Daily life will be full of ups and downs when greed, anger, delusion, and all their relatives come on strong. The wisdom you’ve got may not be sufficient enough to stop them. How do you approach such a situation? The first step is to accept whatever is happening in the mind as it is. Accept that this is just the nature of the mind. Unless you accept, you will be fighting defilements with defilements. I draw the analogy of try to accelerate a car with one foot on the brakes! The car won’t move.

So, when you begin, the mind may not necessarily completely be open to this process. That’s fine. This is how you start when you’re developing your meditation skills. Learn from these different situations. Later on, you’ll begin to notice causes and effects. Understanding the causes that lead to greater momentum in the practice will allow your meditation to improve naturally.

While something is happening, awareness will continue to collect data little by little in the background and wisdom will step in when there is enough data. When wisdom steps in, you will no longer continue with the unskillful action. Acknowledge and work through these challenging situations instead of avoiding them. When the mind comes understand that something that is wrong is wrong, it will not repeat an action again. The lessons are all there for you to work through.

What kind of understanding can you glean from what is happening? You can start by being interested. Then investigate. You will become aware of many different things but be mindful that these are just objects or experiences. Begin to ask more questions: What is a concept? What is reality? Continue to watch and learn.

Cultivate curiosity and interest—they are important ingredients. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes, and never feel bad about having made a mistake. These false steps are the stepping-stones on our path and a part of our progress. We cannot avoid making them. Becoming aware of, carefully looking at, and learning from mistakes is wisdom at work! As we learn from our mistakes, wisdom will start coming in more naturally, more automatically. Over the years, as our practice progresses, as we become more and more mindful, the knowledge and understanding we have accumulated will naturally come in more quickly. Wisdom and mindfulness will start working as a team.

Pay attention to skill and right effort

The dhamma encompasses everything. All the good and all the bad are all nature. You may only want the good and not the bad but that’s impossible to have. You will have negative reactions. When there is insufficient understanding into phenomena or the wrong attitude towards an experience, you will have a negative reaction and you can’t stop that. Just know that a reaction is happening. Know it and understand it, but don’t try and stop it. Everything will fall into place once there is understanding. Wisdom will know how to balance, do what needs to be done and drop the unnecessary bits. Don’t force something to happen. This goes against nature. While you can’t get something just because you want it or you work for it, there are two things that will move us forward: how much you do and how skillful you are. Pay attention to applying skill and right effort—these pieces deserve your attention. Meditation is not like the lottery; you don’t pay a little and win a huge windfall.

Reducing defilements is a learning process, and you will find that your understanding slowly emerges and moves toward the middle path as you recognize the extremes. Suppressing and expressing are the two different extremes, but you will experience them. Watch what the mind does in those moments, learn what is beneficial and adjust accordingly. If you think something is good, you’re at one extreme, if you think something is bad you’re at the other extreme. You have to see things as they are and where they lie. Therein lies the Middle Way. For example, when a defilement arises in the mind, you neither try to stop nor encourage the defilement. Exercise right view in remembering that this defilement is not you. The defilement will express the amount of power it has and you can’t prevent that. Just step back and keep an eye on the defilement, consistently and patiently, learning and figuring out how it functions and its job description. This is a learning process.

How to work with difficulties

How can we view the world through the lens of Dhamma? When we are thinking about the world, we are already thinking about concepts; we are thinking about people, places, and situations. When the mind pays attention to concepts, either wholesome or unwholesome states of minds will come up depending on how much wisdom we have.

I’ve noticed that when yogis observe defilements, it is often from a point of view that they are enemies to be fought. That is already a battle lost. Defilements like it when you fight because fighting in itself is a defilement and they like that they have a spy in your camp. Fighting anger with anger gets you more anger, or “anger-squared.” Defilements cannot stand it when you watch them calmly. When you accept a defilement’s presence, take interest in it, and try to understand it. That’s when the defilement becomes really uncomfortable.

For me, I understood that difficulties would decrease if I practiced mindfulness. I noticed that the intensity of suffering and problems would decrease when I practiced. Truly understanding this motivated me to continue. When real understanding is present and strong, the mind changes for the better. If wisdom isn’t strong enough, the mind can’t change because defilements still arise. There are people who know about meditation but they don’t practice; for these people, their minds do not really change.

Depression drove me to practice wholeheartedly at home. I remember first trying many different ways to alleviate these feelings. I went everywhere that I had ever been and explored new places seeking happiness but the depression followed me everywhere. I couldn’t find happiness when I went out with my friends, whether I went to the beach or to the mountains or when I went thrill-seeking somewhere. Nothing made me happy. Even drugs couldn’t do the job. It finally occurred to me one day that even if I were to go to the moon, the depression would also follow me there.

During this period in my life, my suffering became a very obvious object of meditation. I watched until it became unbearable and then I changed the object to something neutral to continue being aware. In Myanmar, ānāpānasati (awareness of the breath) was used as a common, neutral object but it was too subtle for me at the time because the suffering was so strong. I needed something stronger to make my breath obvious. I found the answer in a Vicks nasal inhaler because I found that when I used the inhaler my attention would be at my nostrils.

When it comes to using wisdom, I’m not asking you to think of a solution or to resolve the situation by thinking. That’s not what I’m saying. Thinking a little allows us to practice effectively. I see it as a considered practice where you are aware and you reflect a little bit on what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and what you’re discovering: a little bit, not a lot. This is what we do when we are at work. When we do our work, we consider whatever work we have done before and how we accomplished this kind of work so we can figure out the best way to move forward. None of us do work without considering how to do it the best way possible. Even when we’re trying to fix something we are not yet familiar with, we may tinker with it, take time to reflect, check what is happening, see whether it is working and then tinker a bit more. That is what I mean by using wisdom in using our own intelligence to find our way in our own practice.

If any of the Brahma Vihāras, or the “sublime states” of loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity arise, the mind will feel good and we will feel at peace and ease in understanding of the way things are. If there is compassion without wisdom, that compassion might actually be contaminated because it is mixed up with a non-acceptance of what actually is; a feeling of helplessness will be in there. If that happens, you will need to clear the mind first. Come back to observing the unwholesome mind state with right view. Do not try to force yourself to have equanimity. Work with the unwholesome states that arise until the mind comes to some balance. Then you will recognize whether it is any of the Brahma Vihāras arising in the mind.

Don’t let go of mindfulness

When I was deep in depression and I began to try practicing at home initially, I watched all my difficult emotions and it became a very strong motivation to keep awareness in order to get better. As soon as it got better I would lose the motivation to be as mindful. I would revert back to my old ways, talking and joking with neighbors and neighboring shops or customers. Then some trigger would hit me really hard, or hit a sore point that brought up all the old anxieties, fears, guilt or shame and I became overwhelmed again. Watching all the old fears and feelings would alleviate it a bit. But when it got better, I forgot again. It felt like people were coming by and slapping or hitting or punching me mentally. It was not intentional on their part; it was just that my mind was not strong enough to be resilient. Over many months, seeing the mind triggered daily and easily, I began to think about why I kept going back into this cycle. I suffered through this many, many times. I then realized that I was becoming too relaxed and not being mindful enough. When I began to feel better, I thought, “I can’t stop being mindful.” Even when I was feeling better and there was nothing to do, I would not waste my time talking needlessly, and I would always be mindful of something or another.

I became prepared when people came to talk to me. Other people can be full of defilements too and they come and unload their defilements on us. If we are not ready, we get affected and infected. Even with family members, I began to realize that I could not just relax. I could not drop mindfulness. My mindfulness got better and more continuous. This is how we learn from life—our failures and difficulties teach us.

Reviewing what has happened

My teacher would always ask how I was practicing and that is what I’m asking you now. “What are you doing?” or “What is special or different today?” were questions my teacher would ask me. Yogis who are practicing will know the answer while those who are not practicing will not know.

Reviewing what goes on in the mind is the work of wisdom. At first, when we watch anger, we are just watching. Reviewing what has happened sets a direction for the mind and creates a map of sorts for future awareness. You have a situation that you consider from different angles and decide to try meditating a certain way the next time. When the next time comes, you are more likely to remember to try it that different way. If you forget, set an intention to try again the next time. When you play a game with the same scenarios occurring again and again, you become an expert at knowing ahead of time what moves are beneficial and what are not at certain junctions.