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Escaping
ClayTheScribe
Veteran
I've just now realized I've been using my meditation as a form to escape my feelings/emotions, mostly the negative and neutral ones. I've always found it very uncomfortable to sit with my fear, anger, aversion, sadness and other such emotions and end up waiting until my 15 minutes are up and then often avoid meditation for days. Have you dealt with this and what have you done?
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Comments
First of all, it is natural to react like this. The noble truths say craving creates suffering, but it is also the opposite of craving (aversion) which creates suffering. As the Buddha said when explaining dukkha: "Departed from the loved, association with the unloved, is suffering"
So the mind tries to run away from itself, from the nature of things. And it creates all kinds of excuses for this: "Today it's too hot, it's too late, this is not really for me, I don't need to do this daily", etc etc.
But, it is immensely important to sit in difficult situations also. Why? Because from them you can learn the most. Also at school teachers say you make mistakes to learn. Now, I don't want to infer that negative mindstates are mistakes, but I hope you get the idea that you can't train a mind only when it goes easy. Just like a cyclist will never really grow when he always waits until the wind is in his back.
So, you need to sit down also when it is hard. This takes a bit of willpower, a bit of what the Buddha called "right effort". The effort to go against our tendencies and see what is actually happening. With a bit of practice you can start to see that sadness and anger are just emotions and the association with them is really something different. You don't need to react to such mindstates. It is possible to let them be. And then they will disappear by themselves.
If this is proving to be hard, not working well, there are also practices to actively counter such states of mind. Compassion is the opposite of anger, joy is the opposite of sadness, equinimity and loving kindness are the opposite of aversion. Those things I mentioned are called the Four Brahmaviharas. I'm sure you can find some more information about them on the internet.
A pitfall to look out for when doing this is to not get the thought "I don't like aversion, so I'll practice metta to get rid of it". This is only more aversion. Just like "I want to be letting go." is a contradiction. So metta is embracing aversion.
I hope this reflection can help you a bit. Thanks for reading.
With metta!
Sabre
Your post does not describe the using of meditation to avoid uncomfortable emotions.
A practise can certainly cause uncomfortable emotions to arise which you can then choose to avoid, but the meditation is what unearths those feelings, not what helps you hide from them.
To the degree that any of us are unable to be exactly where we are, is the degree that all meditaters know exactly what you are experiencing.
That's all of us.
One's meditation practise is the attempt to be open to that which is. A regular meditative practise will build up an inertia towards that openness which will blossom on it's own when all conditions ripen.
Your patience in eventually returning to your meditation practise says that it's all OK.
Supposing for a moment that it were even possible, if you could escape, where would you escape to? Of course people may say they escape into love affairs, horse racing, hiking, alcohol, long-distance running, meditation, art, intellectual advancement, war....
That's what they say.
But is it true?
I doubt it.
"There's a common misunderstanding among all the human beings who have ever been born on the earth that the best way to live is to try to avoid pain and just try to get comfortable. You can see this even in insects and animals and birds. All of us are the same.
A much more interesting, kind, adventurous, and joyful approach to life is to begin to develop our curiosity, not caring whether the object of our inquisitiveness is bitter or sweet. To lead a life that goes beyond pettiness and prejudice and always wanting to make sure that everything turns out on our own terms, to lead a more passionate, full, and delightful life than that, we must realize that we can endure a lot of pain and pleasure for the sake of finding out who we are and what this world is, how we tick and how our world ticks, how the whole thing just is."
I think a better word for what I was doing was trying to avoid feeling the pain, and, most importantly, resisting the pain which creates suffering. What I ended up doing was letting all the darkness wash over me as I said yes to every negative element in my body and mind and eventually it started to lose it's power. Now that I'm out of that depression, it's a practice I try to use all the time and it works remarkably well for me. It's almost like our darkness just wants to be acknowledged and embraced.