A Change of Attitude

If you reflect on your mood right now, what is it? Do you feel happy, unhappy, or neither? Do you feel hot or cold? Do you feel inspired or depressed? Do you feel confused or clear, unsure or sure? Whenever I feel confused, I just try to accept that feeling. What is that like as a feeling?

By asking myself that question I begin to notice and accept the feeling of confusion, rather than just resisting it. Generally, we don’t like to be confused; we want to be unconfused. So we resist it and struggle with it, which makes us even more confused! Instead of trying to get rid of it, however, we can reflect on that as an object, as something to witness and learn from, rather than simply regarding it as an obstacle preventing us from becoming enlightened.

This is a change of attitude, isn’t it? ‘I am too confused! How can I get enlightened if I am confused like this?’ But we can actually use confusion as a way of understanding what it is. When you start thinking you are confused, then you have made a connection with it: ‘I am someone who is confused and I don’t want to be. I want to be someone who is not confused.’ Then you are definitely someone who is going to be confused!

So you can simply be aware of whether the body feels relaxed or tense. You may feel tension in various parts of the body–in the neck, the shoulders, or the solar plexus, for example–and you can actually just witness that, just go to it and accept the tension or the feeling of discomfort, rather than trying to get rid of it.

You can see this ‘trying to get rid of’ as a subtle and clever form of desire because your ideal is to be a relaxed person at ease with life, isn’t it? In which case, any tensions you might feel should be got rid of in order for you to become this ideal person – that is your conditioned mind. Your conditioned mind will go on and on like that, telling you how you should be and how you should not be. But don’t give so much importance to the conditioned mind. Trust more in your ability to reflect and contemplate and accept the way it is ‘right now.’

Conditions arise and cease, so it is not a matter of getting rid of them; they simply go! You don’t have to make them go because their nature is to do so. In that way, you can take it easy. If you just accept conditions as they are and bear them in whatever form they take in the moment, then they pass – and you recognize they are no longer present.

This reflection by Luang Por Sumedho is from the book Ajahn Sumedho Anthology, Volume 3—Direct Realization, “Awakening to Ordinariness,” (pdf) pp. 237-238.