Looking for Distraction

…When I was in Thailand, many years ago, I came in contact with the Theravada tradition. I had gone to a monastery to do a retreat there and this was when I first came into direct contact with the teachings of the Buddha.

Hearing the Four Noble Truths gave me an incredible sense of relief. I had finally found what I had been looking for all my life or, let’s say, for many years of my life. It gave me the answers to many questions that had been there for a long time. It also brought up the question of how I had been living my life. What were my values? What place did they have in my everyday life? How did they manifest?

What I found then was that I had spent a lot of time on things and activities to distract myself from what was not so pleasant to feel, from dissatisfaction and suffering. I knew how to distract myself from those areas where I wasn’t very honest with myself or with others. I started to notice how I did things, how I related in habitual ways without questioning them any more. Did I really want to relate to this person or to this situation in exactly this way? I noticed the lack of evaluation in regard to this. How much attention did I give to relating to others? Did I really want to be aware of the needs of others, and of my own?

My experience of being in a monastery in Thailand was pulling me out of my habitual way of living. I found myself in a completely different world. At times, I just felt bored. There was suddenly so much time for practice and looking inside, for examining what was happening internally. I found myself in places where I experienced boredom because I did not want to look deeper. My habitual pattern of reaction was: ‘what else could I do right now?’ Looking for any kind of distraction from this experience.

But usually there was just nothing much to do this with. One of the few options was relating to others, making contact with them and distracting each other. But you can’t do that for very long. At least not when you are to some degree honest with yourself. Then you notice: I am doing this right now because I don’t want to face the unpleasantness of this experience?

That same moment of honesty, that very experience, brings up the quality of courage. It takes courage to turn away from distraction. To enter that place which is not easeful. To turn towards that which is painful. To acknowledge what needs to stop. To consider a change. It is not an easy thing to do. It involves reflecting on what is really needed here and now. How do we relate to unpleasantness? Of course, I do not mean to say that following a spiritual path, practicing, brings with it only difficult experiences. Of course, it doesn’t. Or why would we want to do it in the first place?

It does, however, require a lot of courage and determination to maintain our practice.

This reflection by Ajahn Metta is from the book, The Body, (pdf) pp. 151-153.