Yogi: When I watch aversion, at what point should I go and do something about it and not just look at the aversion?
Sayadaw: When you have a physical illness or physical discomfort that can be relieved, I’m all for relieving it. The reason is so that the aversion doesn’t keep building in the mind -having aversion build in the mind is not helpful because then you cannot be mindful.
Having done everything we can, sometimes we’re left with residual physical discomfort or mental dis-ease that cannot be relieved. That’s the point when you have to be mindful of it and learn the nature of mind and matter so that the mind is not so affected by the physical discomfort. That’s what we want to learn.
What we can relieve, we relieve and what we cannot, we need to practice watching till we can relieve it.
We start with things we know we can get relief from so that it doesn’t give the mind a lot of pressure. If we sit and there is some pain, we can choose to stand up for the pain to go away, or we can take a little time to investigate what it is like if we watch the aversion in the mind while there is pain in the leg.
If we become skillful at watching aversion so that aversion is not there – if we know how to adjust our mind towards the aversion – we can learn to become almost neutral at watching physical and mental discomfort.
We need to practice now because when we’re on our deathbed, we will probably have pain and then it is too late to start practicing.
We need to have learnt something now so that we can be at peace with whatever is happening as it is.