How Do You Abandon a Feeling?

But how do you abandon a feeling?

When the Buddha talks about abandoning, or letting go, it’s not that your mind has a hand that’s grasping things. You’re engaged in habitual activities, habitual ways of reacting, habitual ways of thinking, habitual ways of breathing, habitual ways of perceiving things, habitual ways of fashioning feelings. And as long as you keep repeating those habitual patterns, you’re holding on.

To let go means to stop. You realize that those old habits are not getting you what you want, so you just stop. Or you learn how to stop. It’s not always automatic, but that’s what you’re aiming for: learning to see where your habitual ways of fabricating your experience are causing stress and pain, realizing that you can develop some alternative skills that don’t produce that pain, and then focusing more and more on those skills. As I said earlier, there is an element of fabrication, an element of intention in all of our feelings, and so you want to focus on that.

There’s bodily fabrication, the way you breathe; verbal fabrication, the way you direct your thoughts to a topic, such as a feeling, and then evaluate that feeling: Is it potentially skillful? Potentially not? What are you going to do with it? And then there’s mental fabrication, which consists of the feelings themselves plus the perceptions that you hold in mind. Now all those fabrications are things you can learn how to manipulate, learn how to shape. You’ve got the raw materials. Sometimes the raw materials are a little recalcitrant, but there are things you can do with them.

So even though there’s a pain or a weakness in the body, you don’t have to obsess about the pain or the weakness. You can focus on where your strengths are; you can focus on where your pleasures are. Focus on different ways of breathing: What kind of breathing would give you more strength? What kind of breathing would give you more pleasure? Experiment. Learn about these things. Which ways of thinking about the breath and evaluating the breath give more pleasure? Which perceptions of the breath give more pleasure, give you more strength?

These are all things you can manipulate, things you can play with.

This reflection by Ajaan Geoff is from the book, The Noble Eightfold Path: 13 Meditation Talks, (pdf) pp. 46-47.