A Fettered Kind of Life

Have you noticed, as you scan your mind, that there are a lot of things that nag you? Unfulfilled projects and wishes, grudges that you know you shouldn’t have, topics of current concern that keep coming back…and around all that, the sense of being stuck in, or with, all of this.

It’s more apparent when you sit still for a while…memories and fancies gnaw at the heart. We don’t always acknowledge them. Sometimes trivial, sometimes poignant, they’re trivial; we don’t know how to respond to them.

Brush off the minor hurts; think about the feelings..and then analyse the thoughts…? It’s a bind because the topics can seem of another time or of years gone by…or really messy. And meanwhile life rolls along more or less OK, and we can get by, provided that we don’t look too far ahead (and don’t look at what’s driving us). Like a horse with blinkers on. We don’t see the ignorance, don’t see the Unknowing.

But it’s a fettered kind of life if our minds don’t widen and deepen beyond what can be seen straight ahead with no effort. We build a reality out of the sense-world, out of what’s outside us and what’s broadcast to us via the media, and assume that’s the real thing.

But large areas of what’s happening to us in the domain of the mind are not being acknowledged and responded to. It’s hardly surprising since most of us live in a context wherein the mind gets overwhelmed by input that is beyond our scope to control or even comprehend. You know…urban life, media saturation, global crises..on top of the usual stuff of personal ups and downs.

So the management program tends towards blinkering and narrowing attention to only certain aspects of life. However, in Dhamma-practice we’re aiming to widen and deepen, at least in our own domain. Life might be surprising, and we might have more resources than we imagine…

The teaching of the Buddha is that with a trained attention and a change of view, problems that seemed solid can melt. Things that one felt oneself as stuck with don’t have to be that way. There’s a process that we can undertake. But it does require the resolution and the aspiration to attend fully, comprehensively and wisely.

Direct attention to the mind takes us into what’s lodged there. It’s not always so pretty: moods that feel lumpy and stodgy, feelings that harden until they seem rock-like. And there can be a sense of having to carry all this, of a ‘me’ that is trapped in all this psycho-emotional stuff.

The sense of having stuff and of being someone who has a lot of stuff they have to work out – all that is what I mean by ‘stuckness.’  It’s that very sense, not just the topics that it forms around, we aim to meet and release in meditation.

The way the Dhamma-process goes is that when we can get light enough and free enough from that sense, then we can see and address the moods and topics from a wiser, steadier place. And in a lot of cases, just by dropping the weight of it all, some topics fade out altogether.

This reflection by Ajahn Sucitto is from the article, “Working with the Stuck Places.”