The Howling Dog Syndrome

Probably every one of us who has practised meditation has experienced the ‘howling dog’ syndrome.

It’s like you have something within you that is whining and, hearing it, you think, ‘I’ll shut that out and get on with the practice.’ It’s like having a dog howling in the basement, so you close the door and move up to the next floor to get away from all that. But the howling gets louder – maybe it’s about the difficult state of your body, or the unresolved feeling you have about somebody you’re living with. You think ‘These aren’t spiritual matters, so cut them out. Move up a level!’ So you move up another floor. The howling gets louder. Eventually you get up to the roof, but the howling is still disturbing your peace of mind. And then there’s nowhere else to go: you’ve got to turn around and go all the way down and meet the howling dog and make friends with it.

Quite a bit of our practice is rather like this – coming to terms, meeting one’s craving, one’s pain, one’s grief, one’s sense of self, in fact. And of all howling dogs, the daddy of them all is this sense of self. Now when I’m saying ‘sense of self’, I’m not questioning our existence, but pointing out that what we sense as self is always changing and unsatisfactory.

The sense of self always has to have something or do something. It wants to be approved of by somebody, or be busy winning at something, or be analysing itself, or trying to wipe itself out. It is always orbiting around some need or another. There’s the need to know something or have an opinion or the need to feel one’s doing good enough; the need to feel that one is useful; the need to feel that other people like me. The need to be the same as everyone else or the need to be different from everyone else. Or different on some days, the same on other days. And the need to be able to change from being same to being different when I need to.

And so on – it never really settles. It’s a busy creature this howling dog.

This reflection by Ajahn Sucitto is from the article, “Good Enough.”