We Do Have Some Control

Sometimes a useful perception is seeing the pain as something receding from you. Think of yourself as sitting in the back of one of those old station wagons where the back seats face back. You’re sitting there watching the road recede away from you as you’re actually headed in the direction behind your back. So when a pain comes, it’s not that it’s actually coming at you. The pain is going, going, going, going away. You’re watching it go, go, go away.  Another pain may come to replace it, but that’s just another pain that you’re going to watch go, go, go.

Hold that perception in mind, that you’re not on the receiving end of a lot of this stuff, and things will be a lot easier to take. Because you do see that the individual moments of pain do go, go, go, go, go. And as you focus on that, it gives you less of a sense of being a victim, of being a target, and more of a sense of being in charge of the choices you have.

…So simply having that perception that you have a role to play in how much pain there’s going to be, and how much suffering there’s going to be gives you the confidence to face down a lot of pains that otherwise you couldn’t stand.

This is what mindfulness of feelings is all about: learning how to see the intentional element in the feeling you’re focusing on and learning how to change the intentional element so that you’re not suffering so much, so that you can abandon unskillful ways of dealing with feelings and replace them with more skillful ones. Instead of jumping back and forth between household grief and household joy, or householder distress and householder joy, you jump over to renunciate grief, which, as I said, is like pulling back the bow that shoots the arrow over to renunciate joy.

It’s what allows you to give rise not only to physical pleasure but also to mental pleasure, mental ease. Even when there are pains that you can’t change, you can still have a sense of mental ease around them. This is what that second frame of reference, feelings in and of themselves, is all about.

So always keep in mind the fact you do have some control over these things, that you want to find where the control is, and that you want to maximize it for the purpose of what’s skillful.

That’s how you bring ardency to the practice of mindfulness.

This reflection by Ajaan Geoff is from the book, The Noble Eightfold Path: 13 Meditation Talks, (pdf) pp. 47, 48.